[RERUN] EPISODE 66: Sex in Ancient Rome

History on Fire

Daniele Bolelli

Society & Culture

4.8 • 5.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 131 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a cultural history episode about sexuality in Ancient Rome. I thought the topic would be fun and juicy, but that’s because my memory of Roman sexuality was hazy. After refreshing it with lots of research, I can safely say that ‘fun’ is not a word I would apply to it. ‘Insanely disturbing’ is probably more fitting. Most of the ancient sources, in fact, seem to indicate that little to no attention was paid to the idea of sex being for mutual pleasure. Rather, sex was primarily seen as something to reinforce dominance and hierarchy. In this episode, we’ll cover prison sex, rapey garden gnomes, the similarities and differences between ancient Roman and Christian sexualities, the origin of the word ‘family’ (it’s not pleasant), threatening sexual violence to prove one’s manliness, the violent myths about Rome’s founding, the Rape of the Sabine women, sex and slavery, prostitution, why speaking of homosexuality or heterosexuality made no sense in Ancient Rome, legal trials as rap battles, Cicero & the art of character assassination, Mark Anthony & the art of assassinating Cicero, Augustus’ puritanism, gladiators fighting against their own wildcat-shaped phalli, Roman sexual art, and much, much more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to episode 66 of History on Fire.
0:04.7	To start sinks off a big, big thank you to all the sweet folks supporting my work, either on
0:11.0	Patreon or on substock.
0:13.4	Some of these sweet people donate about $5 per month, which not only keeps the podcast going,
0:19.4	but also gives them access to a whole bunch of extra content since I record at least one
0:25.0	mini episode per month exclusive to this folks and then there are some people
0:30.3	win crazy moments of generosity donate even more. At the highest
0:35.4	possible level of donations on Patreon we got Mr. Mark Chang, Chimimim-Moxam,
0:41.2	Justin Bourne and Julian Bailey.
0:44.0	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
0:45.0	If you want to join this brave band of heroes,
0:48.0	add to Patreon.com for a slash history on fire or to substock. I'm gonna put a link tree with all my Instagram and Substock and YouTube
1:00.8	channel and you name it all in the episode notes.
1:04.4	So if you want to check that out, that would be great.
1:07.4	Last couple of things I want to say before we got things going
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1:47.0	so anything from like Cordicips, Turkeytail, Lyons, Main, stuff like that. Each of the mushroom have particular purposes. I've tried quite a few of them and I found them awesome.
	...

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