3
FROM WARRIORS TO LOVERS
“Sniff!” our guide commands as she thrusts a leaf snipped from a bush in the Roman Forum under my nose. “What do you smell?”
I inhale deeply. The aroma is tantalizingly familiar—fresh, spicy, woodsy, a scent I immediately link to a certain type of alpha male—but I can’t identify its name.
“Glory!” she exclaims.
Wreaths woven of such laurel leaves once crowned Rome’s conquering generals as they rode in triumph behind twelve attendants bearing fasces, the long rods and ax symbolizing power over life and death. At their sides, a slave repeatedly whispered, “Memento mori,” a reminder that despite the adulation they remained mortal, destined to die. Yet for the moment they could bask in the honor of extending the rule of Rome, described by the writer Pliny as a gift “bestowed upon the human race like a second source of light.”
On a soft September night, the glories of Rome surround me like the stage set of a majestic historical drama. Jagged columns jut toward the stars. Triumphal arches, pocked by time and thieves, gleam in floodlights. Multimedia spectacles projected onto ancient walls reconstruct the bustle of Caesar’s Forum and the grandeur of Augustus’s temple. All testify to a long-lost time when every road led to Rome and every nation bowed under its command.
Rome changed everything. Drawing on earlier cultures, it adapted and refined the intellectual and technical heritage of Greece, Carthage, Egypt, and the East. The laws of its Twelve Tables brought order to a tumultuous world. Its government established the separation of powers and served as a model for the American and French Constitutions. Its Roman arch would prove as crucial to architecture as the wheel to transportation. Its sturdy roads, spanning more than fifty thousand miles, carried pilgrims, traders, adventurers, and caravans of exotic goods from every corner of the sprawling empire.
Lives were short (an average of forty-one years for men, twenty-nine for women) and the future uncertain. “Carpe diem!” the poet Horace urged, and so the Romans, masters of the art of living, did—with gusto.
“WERE THEY LIKE US?” I wonder aloud as I survey the still-glorious remnants of the ancient Romans.
Our guide suggests a more salient question: “Are we like them?”
Not at first glance. Rome’s was a pagan creed, with a bloodlust that ran deep. Honed into an invincible killing machine, its legions enslaved millions and lined miles of roads with the crucified bodies of enemies. Its citizen-soldiers killed without compunction—and faced the prospect of being killed without complaint.
Even in their private lives, Romans didn’t shy away from brutality. Crowds cheered as wild beasts mauled each other and gladiators—the sexiest celebrities of the day—fought to the death. Violence permeated homes as well as arenas. By law a Roman patriarch could kill an unwanted or sickly newborn, a disrespectful slave, or a wife who committed adultery or aborted a child without his consent.
Although the Roman Empire would ultimately crumble and fall, its influence would endure. The passion of its citizens entered the spiritual DNA of their descendants and spread beyond geopolitical borders. Even now, twenty-some centuries later, people around the world still do as the ancient Romans once did.
We prize our families and honor our dead. We take for granted creature comforts that the Romans invented, such as indoor plumbing and heated water. We call the months of the year and the planets in the heavens by their Roman names. We soothe ourselves with music, soak in warm baths, wildly cheer our favorite teams, sip wine, linger over delicious dinners, and laugh at bawdy comics and clowns.
Like the Romans, we garb ourselves in stylish clothes, fancy footwear, and statement jewelry. Modern women experiment with hairstyles (including hair extensions and wigs), fight wrinkles, and apply makeup that is thankfully far less noxious than the “mascara” of ground-up roasted ants favored by Rome’s beauties. Men still try to conceal their baldness, but more subtly than with the lampblack their Roman counterparts applied to their scalps (a ruse that worked only across the vast Circus Maximus).
In our pursuit of romance and happiness, observes Alberto Angela, the archaeologist and author of Amore e sesso nell’antica Roma (Love and Sex in Ancient Rome), contemporary men and women may be more similar to the ancient Romans than any prior generation. “No other civilization or culture of past or of recent centuries,” he contends, “has ever been closer to them in terms of daily life, love, and sex.”
BUT HOW CAN WE RECONCILE the Romans’ staggering achievements with their shocking cruelty? How can we comprehend their ability both to kill ruthlessly and to love passionately?
“Think of the gods the Romans worshipped: Mars and Venus,” says the archaeologist Livia Galante as we walk among the remains of their temples. As sons of Mars, the Romans were warriors, the fiercest on earth. As sons of Venus, they were lovers who embraced sex as her sweetest gift, to be enjoyed as freely as fine wine, without a twinge of guilt.
Over the arc of their history, the Romans evolved from warriors to lovers. This chapter introduces some emblematic figures from this long transition: Lucretia, a noble wife who would inspire her countrymen’s passion for freedom. Caesar, the consummate warrior and lover who would stand astride the ancient world like a colossus. His successor Augustus, who would bestow on Rome the most enduring peace in history.
In time, the sons of Mars would lay down their swords and become statesmen, scholars, and sophisticated lovers of earthly pleasures. Venus would have her day. The Roman Empire, straddling three continents, would bask in a time when, as the historian Edward Gibbon wrote, “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.”
Yet pagan Rome never completely shed its blood-drenched past. On an evening tour of “dark Rome,” I descend into the depths of the Colosseum, where ravenous beasts once roared from cramped cages and gladiators armed themselves for deadly duels. Its sodden ground turned red with the blood of men and beasts. Animal carcasses—as many as five thousand in a single day—were hauled away via a special gate. Gripped by a sudden chill, I understand more profoundly that the primal passion that propelled Rome into history was power—in the arena, on the battlefield, and in the bedroom.
LIKE MARS, ROMAN WARRIORS SEIZED whatever—and whomever—they desired. For centuries, a sessualità di stupro (sexuality based on rape), as Italian sociologists describe it, permeated Roman society. Sex, like everything else in virile Rome, was about conquest.
Men wrote the rules—and when it came to sex, there was only one: a Roman man must always dominate. Taking rather than providing pleasure, he could couple with a woman, a young boy, or a slave of either sex. Sexuality itself, deemed as natural as any appetite, saturated Rome and its territories.
Graphic sexual images appeared on dinnerware, lanterns, and paintings hung in homes and taverns, in view of women and children as well as men. Both sexes wore jewelry in phallic shapes to ward off malignant spirits. Statues of the ever-erect, hugely endowed god Priapus, the carrier of life and incarnation of male sexual vigor, decorated street corners and gardens, where they helped to frighten off birds.
There was no differentiation—nor even any words—for heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian. “Greek-style” encounters seemed a novel way of experiencing pleasure. Sophisticated Roman men were almost expected to appreciate beauty in a winsome boy’s body just as they did in a woman’s—as long as they always dominated. Aristocrats (and the occasional emperor) often doted on young male partners, but consensual sex between free adult men was frowned upon as degrading to a citizen of Rome.
The taboo against passive submission extended to every sexual act. Because the mouth, as the organ of speech, was considered sacred, a man who “dirtied” his by performing oral sex on another man or, even more unthinkably, a woman was betraying the honor of Rome. The passive role in sex with a man seemed the ultimate humiliation, a reason Roman soldiers sometimes sodomized defeated enemies.
While a man was judged for his virility, a woman’s greatest virtue was pudicitia, sexual purity that demanded chastity before marriage and fidelity after. A girl’s lips were expected to be as virginal as her body, untouched by any but her husband. After marriage, a man could assert il diritto del bacio (the right of the kiss) to check his wife’s breath and see if she had drunk any wine—an offense punishable by death. The legal justification: “A woman greedy for wine closes the door to virtue and opens it to vice.”
A ROMAN HUSBAND PROUDLY DISPLAYED a good wife as a trophy enhancing the honor of his family. One evening in 509 BC, Livy records, some young cavalrymen besieging a nearby town drunkenly debated their mates’ virtues. Certain that his wife, Lucretia, outshone all others, one of the men, named Collatinus, suggested that they ride the few miles back to Rome to check on their women.
Arriving late in the evening, they found the wives eating and reclining on banquettes—except one. At Collatinus’s house, Lucretia was spinning by lamplight alongside her maids. She graciously offered dinner to her husband and his guests.
The charm of this virtuous woman inflamed the son of the reigning king, a despised tyrant known as Tarquin the Proud. A few nights later the prince, burning with what Shakespeare called his “scarlet lust,” returned to the house, entered Lucretia’s bedroom, and declared his desire for her. When she rebuffed him, he threatened to murder her and leave her in bed next to the naked body of her African slave. Everyone would think that they had been killed while committing adultery. Horrified at such a disgrace to her family, Lucretia submitted.
The next day, she summoned her father and husband. Struggling for composure, Lucretia told them what had happened. “Only my body was violated, my spirit is innocent,” she tearfully recounted. “I will kill myself, and my death will prove it. But promise me that this act will not go unpunished.” With a knife hidden in her robes, she stabbed herself in the heart.
The death of Lucretia marked a turning point in Roman history. Her relatives carried her body through the streets to the Senate. Raging against the despotic king, the people forced him to flee. Rome’s legislators, determined never again to allow a monarch supreme power, formed the Republic.
Lucretia gained an immortality of her own in paintings by Botticelli and Titian, a narrative poem by Shakespeare in 1594, an opera by Benjamin Britten in 1946—and inclusion in Judy Chicago’s 1979 feminist installation, The Dinner Party, a tribute to more than a thousand heroines of world history featuring plates that depict female genitals.
MARRIAGE, ALBEIT BY ARRANGEMENT rather than abduction, became a Roman’s civic and social duty. The poor paired off in simple rituals, such as placing a woman’s hand in a man’s and reciting a vow. The upper classes bartered their daughters for the family’s political or financial gain. Brides, usually girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen, engaged to grooms twice their age or older, had no say in the matter. As a business transaction, marriage was too important to allow either love or passion to enter the negotiations.
The marriage bed was reserved for reproduction, not recreation. Erotic desire, viewed with suspicion as irrational and uncontrollable, was discouraged, if not actually forbidden, in marriage. “He who loves his wife with too much passion,” a statesman warned, “commits adultery.” Husbands could readily indulge carnal desires elsewhere—and indulge they did.
Prostitutes, wearing thigh-high togas and bright red, orange, or blue wigs, sold their bodies and skills under bridges or in the shadows of the Forum. Lupanaria (wolves’ dens, or brothels) offered a range of services for prices that ranged from less than the cost of a glass of wine to as much as a soldier’s daily salary for specialized items on a crudely drawn “menu” of sexual positions. Men with money and influence could find more options among actresses, dancers, beauticians, masseuses, and workers at the public baths, considered by the nature of their trades to be amenable to sexual overtures.
AS ROME EXPANDED ITS BOUNDARIES and increased its wealth, political and social tensions threatened to tear the Republic apart. By the second century BC, the plebes, or common people, were clamoring for reform, while the aristocratic elite clung to power and wealth. Civil wars erupted, with violent street fights and rioting in Rome. In these perilous times, a man emerged to tower above all others: Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), who proudly traced his bloodline to Venus and her son Aeneas.
“Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered), he declared after one victory. These three words summarize his passion: Caesar lived to conquer—by sword, word, or seduction.
While still in his teens, Caesar plotted a brilliant political career, beginning with marriage to Cornelia, a daughter of Rome’s political leader. Two years later a civil war swept the dictator Sulla, a rival of Caesar’s father-in-law, to power. He demanded that Caesar divorce Cornelia and wed his stepdaughter. When he refused, Caesar was condemned to death. Fleeing into the countryside, he contracted malaria. His mother persuaded the Vestal Virgins, the most influential women in Rome, to plead for her son’s life. Sulla relented, and Caesar returned to Rome—not yet twenty but a survivor of political and personal peril.
While fulfilling his military service, Caesar was dispatched to serve the king of Bithynia (the northern coast of modern Turkey). Rumors circulated that the homosexual monarch welcomed Caesar to his bed as well as his court. For the rest of his career, Caesar would be mocked as the “queen of Bithynia” for his passive role in the alleged affair. He brushed aside the gossip and repeatedly proved his macho mettle.
Captured by pirates while sailing across the Aegean Sea, Caesar dispatched servants to bring a hefty ransom and passed his six-week captivity taunting the crew with his plans to kill the lot of them. They thought he was joking. As soon as he was freed, Caesar engaged armed vessels, retrieved his money, captured the pirates, and crucified them all—cutting their throats first as an act of clemency.
By age thirty, Caesar had proven himself a fearless commander, a gifted orator, a dutiful husband to an impeccably virtuous wife, and a loving father to their daughter. When Cornelia died in labor the following year, he buried her in a grand public funeral, the first for a woman so young.
Then as now, ambitious men needed money to fuel their passion for power. Pompeia, granddaughter of the dictator Sulla, brought plenty to her marriage to Caesar. Her enormous inheritance subsidized his lavish spending on favors to influential allies, dinner parties, and gladiator games—one with a record 320 pairs of fighters in ornate silvered armor.
Caesar’s extravagance paved his way up the ladder of political offices, but charm helped him woo and win scores of lovers, many married to his colleagues and enemies. His longest relationship was with a noblewoman named Servilia, mother of Brutus, whom Caesar came to love as a son.
“The husband of all the wives,” said Caesar’s admirers. “And the wife of all the husbands,” jeered his enemies. Yet all agreed that, as the historian Adrian Goldsworthy reports, the “sheer scale of his activities stood out in Roman society, which at this time did not lack adulterers or rakes.”
CAESAR’S MILITARY CONQUESTS CARVED OUT vast new territories for Rome, including most of modern France, Switzerland, Belgium, southern Holland, western Germany, and the British Isles. During his campaigns, his legions—a battle-hardened army that, as he put it, “could storm the very heavens”—captured eight hundred cities, towns, and forts and killed or enslaved, by his account, millions of their residents.
Wary of Caesar’s growing power and popularity, in 49 BC the Senate issued an ultimatum demanding surrender of his command. Instead, Caesar broke a long-standing tenet of Roman law and led one of his legions—some five thousand men—across the Rubicon River and into Italy. In a brilliant blitzkrieg, he swept through Italy, with town after town opening its gates in surrender.
In two months, with almost no bloodshed, Caesar gained full control of Rome’s military and treasury. He initiated a program of social and governmental reforms, introduced the twelve-month “Julian” calendar, centralized the Republic’s bureaucracy, and won designation as “dictator in perpetuity.” With each new role and responsibility, the brilliant tactician and unscrupulous politician evolved into a more astute statesman and governor.
When Caesar pursued his remaining enemies to Egypt, local allies delivered the mummified head of his longtime rival Pompey. In true Roman fashion, the warrior quickly turned into a lover—this time of Egypt’s twenty-two-year-old queen Cleopatra. Historians still debate who seduced whom.
Striking if not conventionally beautiful, Cleopatra may have stirred Caesar’s passion with her quick mind and nubile body. Even more seductively, she came to him as his equal, queen of an opulent realm and soon the mother of his only son. Although Caesar would never marry her, he presented his Egyptian prize to Rome, where he scandalized its residents by placing a statue of Cleopatra next to Venus’s in the goddess’s temple.
Caesar’s foes feared that the overreaching ruler would soon declare himself emperor. In 44 BC, on the fifteenth, or ides, of March, a gaggle of senators ambushed him on his way to the Senate. Stabbed again and again, he fought back with his metal stylus. But when Brutus raised his dagger, Caesar cried out, “You too, child!” (not the oft-quoted “Et tu, Brute?”), and collapsed, bleeding to death from twenty-three wounds.
THE WORLD AS ROME KNEW IT turned upside down. Full-scale civil war erupted. Brutus and some of the other conspirators fled. Gaius Octavius (Octavian; 63 BC–AD 14), Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew, adopted son, and chief heir, and his loyal lieutenant Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony; 83–30 BC) emerged as corulers and pursued Caesar’s assassins. Then passions again changed the course of history.
Mark Antony had always been more of a lover than a warrior—not just of women, but of wine, revelry, and the demimonde of the theater. In 40 BC, he married for the fourth time, choosing Octavian’s sister to reinforce his alliance with Caesar’s heir. Then he left to rule over Rome’s distant provinces, including Egypt.
Soon he fell under the spell of its siren queen, who would bear three of his children. Sinking ever deeper into the decadence of the desert kingdom, Antony seemed to forget he had half an empire to rule—and a formidable young rival watching and waiting in Rome.
Violating sacred taboos, Octavian broke into the temple of the Vestal Virgins to retrieve Mark Antony’s will. This secret document spelled out his plan to give conquered territories as kingdoms to his sons with Cleopatra. The Roman plebes turned against him. In 32 BC, the Senate declared war on Egypt. After more than a year of naval battles and sieges, Octavian defeated the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BC.
When he realized that all was lost, Antony threw himself on his sword. Cleopatra, by means of a poisonous asp, also took her fate into her own hands. Warriors and lovers, they ended their lives on their terms, determined—as Shakespeare has Cleopatra say—to “make death proud to take us.”
MANY DOUBTED THAT YOUNG OCTAVIAN could hold on to power. He proved them wrong, ruling longer and bringing Rome greater glory than any of its emperors. This seemed his destiny—especially when the Senate, three years after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, took an unheard-of step and declared the deceased ruler a god.
The twenty-one-year-old princeling, who began identifying himself as divi filius (son of gods), quickly learned that descendants of deities could claim whatever they desired. And from their first meeting in 39 BC, he desired Livia Drusilla, a woman from an illustrious family whom the poet Ovid described as having the features of Venus and the mettle of Juno, the formidable queen of the gods.
At the time, both Octavian and Livia happened to be married. Octavian’s much older wife, Scribonia, whom he had wed to cement a political alliance, was carrying their first child. Livia was pregnant with her second child by a husband who had twice allied himself against Octavian—first with Caesar’s assassins and then with Mark Antony.
The existence of two spouses and two unborn children proved to be trivial obstacles. On the day their daughter Giulia (Julia; 39 BC–AD 14) was born, Octavian sent his wife a letter informing her of their divorce and taking the newborn into his custody. Just as perfunctorily, Livia’s husband was “persuaded,” perhaps with financial or political inducements, to divorce his wife.
Within days of giving birth, Livia married Octavian. The couple’s erotic passion evolved over time, with Livia personally selecting the nubile virgins her husband enjoyed deflowering. However, their shared passion for imperial power endured in a union that lasted for more than fifty years.
Declared “first among citizens,” Octavian proved a shrewd and often ruthless leader, who adroitly eliminated enemies, bolstered alliances, and wove together a fragile coalition. In 27 BC, he restored the Republic—but only in name. Rather than calling himself “Caesar,” he accepted the title “Augustus” for his role as a mediator between mere mortals and his godly peers and pursued the Roman passions for power and glory in a new way.
“Augustus was the first to use art and architecture for the sake of propaganda, for sending the message, ‘I am in charge,’ ” says the archaeologist Livia Galante, who notes that he proudly declared, “Feci, refeci, perfeci” (Latin for “I made, I restored, I completed”). At the end of his life, the mortal “god” would remind Romans that he had “found a city of brick and left behind a city of marble.”
With less success, Augustus tried to rein in his subjects’ wilder passions (though unable to restrain his own). The Romans never forgave him. He retained their admiration but lost their affection after a series of decrees declared marriage a civic obligation, raised taxes on unmarried citizens, and imposed harsh penalties to discourage extramarital affairs. Rather than dealing with a wife’s adultery within the family, as in the past, the new laws required a husband to report an unfaithful spouse and meted out severe punishments.
Yet even an official edict did not restrain his rebellious daughter Giulia.
WALKING THROUGH THE RUINS of Augustus’s splendid palace on the Palatine, I imagine the little girl, snatched from her mother at birth and starved for affection, who grew up amid its regal trappings. Giulia’s icy, ever-critical stepmother, Livia, controlled every aspect of her life. To her father, she served mainly, in her biographer’s words, as a “pedina di vetro” (glass pawn) for his political machinations.
At age two, Giulia was engaged to the ten-year-old son of Mark Antony (whose fall from favor ended the wedding plans). When she was fourteen, Augustus arranged her marriage to his eighteen-year-old nephew, who died just two years later. He chose his great general Agrippa (ca. 63–12 BC) as her next husband.
Giulia would bear five children for a man almost twenty-five years her senior. But as Agrippa governed the vast Eastern provinces, she relished her first taste of freedom, along with the delights of festivals, chariot races—and handsome young suitors who shared her urbane interests.
Rome buzzed with gossip about Giulia’s serial affairs, wild parties, and wine-soaked evenings with devotees of Bacchus. “Shameless beyond any taunt of shamelessness,” the statesman Seneca thundered, Augustus’s daughter “admitted flocks of lovers as she wandered the city in nocturnal revels….The very Forum and rostrum from which her father had made known his law on adultery suited his daughter for fornication.”
When a pundit observed that her children, rather remarkably, all looked like Agrippa, Giulia retorted, “I never take a passenger on board unless the ship’s hold has a full cargo.” The plebes adored her. Augustus, amused by her sunny gaiety, quipped that he had two somewhat wayward daughters: the Roman Republic and Giulia.
Agrippa never indicated any awareness of his wife’s extramarital escapades before his death of a sudden illness in 12 BC. All three of their sons, designated as Augustus’s heirs, died young. Livia, an adroit behind-the-scenes manipulator, was suspected of some role in the untimely deaths.
Rome’s ambitious First Lady masterminded Giulia’s marriage to her son Tiberius, who was happily wed and seemingly devoid of political aspirations. Although neither he nor Giulia wanted the match, both bent to Livia’s indomitable will. A brokenhearted Tiberius divorced his beloved (and pregnant) wife, whom he was forbidden to see after following her through the Forum with tears in his eyes. Giulia and he conceived a child, who lived for only ten days, and the couple grew apart. In 6 BC, Tiberius decided to “retire” to Rhodes, in part because of his troubled marriage.
In 2 BC, Giulia became entangled with Iullus Antonius, a son of Mark Antony (her father’s archrival) and perhaps the true love of her life, who hatched a plot to murder Augustus and rule Rome with her. When the scheme was uncovered, Iullus killed himself. As part of his official review of the investigation, Augustus, who had long dismissed whispers about Giulia’s promiscuity, confronted detailed descriptions of his daughter’s transgressions. He was devastated by her betrayal—and furious.
Giulia paid a high price for her passion. Augustus publicly charged his own daughter with adultery and set in motion a divorce for Tiberius. Refusing to meet or speak with Giulia, Augustus, in essence, buried her alive by exiling her to a small rock of an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, with no companion other than her mother, no wine, and no comforts of any sort.
After years of public supplication on Giulia’s behalf, Augustus allowed her to move to a desolate corner of Reggio Calabria in southern Italy. Despite her repeated pleas, he refused any further mercy. “Would that I had never married or that I had died without offspring,” he lamented.
When Tiberius assumed the throne after Augustus’s death, he ordered his ex-wife’s rations cut so she could quietly “waste away.” Giulia died of starvation at age fifty-two—a long life for a woman of her time but one that must have seemed an eternity. Yet, as contemporary historians note, Giulia achieved what the vast majority of Roman women did not: in daring to follow her own passions, she carved a place for herself—albeit a sad one—in Roman history.
THE PAX ROMANA, Augustus’s most lasting legacy, endured without major wars for more than two hundred years. During this long season in the sun, Romans changed. But first they would sink to the lowest levels of debauchery as their darkest passions ran their course.
After Tiberius’s death in AD 37, the throne passed to twenty-four-year-old Caligula (AD 12–41), so mad and monstrous that his own guards murdered him after a reign of less than four years. They found his lame uncle Claudius (10 BC–AD 54) trembling with fear in the gardens and declared him emperor. Although he had never sought imperial power, Claudius proved a competent administrator until his death, almost certainly by poison.
His successor Nero (AD 37–68)—“a self-obsessed, mother-killing pyromaniac,” in the historian Mary Beard’s words—may have arranged the huge fire that incinerated Rome in AD 64 in order to clear land for a vast new palace. After the imperial guards assassinated Nero, the last scion of Caesar’s dynasty, political chaos engulfed Rome, with four emperors rising and falling in a single year.
Yet, despite these internal upheavals, the empire grew in wealth, power, and land. At its largest in the year 117, Rome’s dominion extended from Scotland to the Sahara, the Iberian coast to the edge of Iran. In a capital teeming with exotic temptations, Romans of every class indulged their every passion.
Sex—never burdened with moral injunctions—became a free-for-all frolic, while marriage, once a pillar of state and society, fell out of fashion. One essayist dubbed it “a necessary evil to be avoided whenever possible.” Others derided it as a seccatura, a nuisance or “drying up” that sucked the life from a man.
Those who needed an advantageous marriage or wanted legitimate heirs endured the requisite nuptials but then opted for quick-and-easy divorces—so many that the Senate capped the number allowed per citizen at eight. But who needed a wife or series of wives with so many enticing alternatives?
TOTAL FREEDOM FOR THE GANDERS brought some degree of liberation for the geese. According to the sociologist Eva Cantarella, author of Dammi mille baci (Give Me a Thousand Kisses), women in the post-Augustan age achieved a degree of independence unmatched until modern times. Breaking free of the stern morality of centuries past, Venus’s daughters actively pursued their own passions. One practical reason for their emancipation: women could afford to do as they pleased.
After wars and uprisings killed many of its citizen-soldiers, Rome’s legislators, eager to preserve family wealth, allowed inheritances to pass to daughters as well as sons. Marriage laws changed as well, so that a wife’s assets no longer automatically became her husband’s property. Widows, divorcées, and orphaned daughters found themselves, ostensibly with the guidance of a “tutor,” managing substantial sums, owning properties, and even supervising businesses. More women took the initiative and divorced unfaithful or indifferent husbands. Some resorted to poison as an expedient alternative.
Upper-class women, swathed in diaphanous silk and adorned with gold, studied Greek and philosophy, formed literary salons, and nurtured passions for art, literature, and design. Some wrote erotic verses deemed virtuous because they were addressed to their husbands. Increasingly, wives and ex-wives ventured into public spaces without male escorts, including theaters (the Vestal Virgins had prime seats).
Chariot races and gladiator matches drew throngs of women who wildly cheered their favorites—and bestowed favors of their own. A senator’s wife abandoned her children to run off to Egypt to live with a gladiator with a scarred body, a battered face, and a skull dented by blows to his helmet. Perhaps, Rome’s gossips murmured, she was more attracted by his sword.
WITH DAYS NUMBERED, death inevitable, and an unknown, unknowable abyss awaiting, the Romans of the post-Augustan age focused on the pleasures of life—yet derived less joy from endless festivals and meaningless hookups. Soldiers’ sons and grandsons, no longer required to serve in the military, turned into petty bureaucrats, trapped in interminable meetings and tedious protocols. Spectators rather than competitors in games and sports, Rome’s men grew soft.
In the second century AD, physicians diagnosed an epidemic of exhaustion, anxiety, and other signs of what we might call stress among affluent men throughout the empire. The most likely culprit, they concluded, was sex.
According to an influential theory imported from Greece, every ejaculation of semen sapped a man’s virility and depleted his vitality. Manly Romans, who had long engaged in sexual exploits to confirm their macho identity, were cautioned to adopt l’etica della continenza (the ethic of restraint) to ease their vague malaise. Husbands were advised to curtail or, better yet, entirely avoid sex beyond the marital bed, especially with boys or men.
And so relationships between the sexes changed again. Rather than viewing marriage as a business arrangement or political ploy, brides and grooms began to choose each other on the basis of mutual attraction and affection. Women played a more important role in family and society, but at the same time, they reverted to the oldest Roman values. Like the good wife in the early days of the Republic, a bride was once again expected to arrive at marriage a virgin, remain faithful to her husband, and stay with him until death.
No longer battle-ready warriors or wanton lovers, men took refuge in the home as a sanctuary. Allies could quickly turn into enemies, while a devoted wife remained the one person a man could trust in every circumstance. As part of the new morale di coppia (spirit of the couple), mutual fidelity took on greater appeal—as did shared sexual pleasure. Erotic art, featuring women as fully involved—and aroused—partners, appeared on the walls of middle-class homes as well as aristocratic villas.
AMID CATACLYSMS OF EVERY SORT, including the first assaults by barbarians descending from the north, a loving marriage emerged as the mainstay of personal happiness, nurtured by a passion more profound than mere appetite or lust. The hardened warriors of centuries past began to love in ways that Rome’s founders could never have imagined.
How do we know about this emotional metamorphosis?
“The Romans showed us how they felt,” says Christopher Hallett, a professor of classics and art history at the University of California, Berkeley. “After centuries of stoic restraint, Romans in the first centuries after Christ began to express real emotions rather than just platitudes of praise.” We find their heartfelt words in private notes and diaries, erotic verses, and the funeral inscriptions they left behind.
In a letter to his wife, the magistrate Pliny the Younger wrote, “It is incredible how much I miss you—first of all, because I love you….My feet literally carry me to your rooms. But when I do not find you there, I retreat, lovesick.” When his twenty-three-year-old wife died, a young Roman grieved, “She was dearer to me than life.” After eighteen “happy years together,” another widower declared, “for love of her, I have sworn never to remarry.”
We find similar sentiments on the tombs that line the Appian Way. These memorials, the sole claim to immortality for most Romans, once depicted men as valiant warriors or imperious officials of the state. But in the post-Augustan age, Rome’s citizens chose to display their tenderness—albeit in idealized form, with their faces superimposed on godly bodies. A husband often appeared as a buff Adonis dying in the arms of a shapely Venus with his wife’s features. A widower included both his spouses on their shared tomb—his deceased wife sleeping next to him and her successor, bare to the waist, sitting on the edge of the bed.
THE POST-AUGUSTAN GOLDEN AGE PRODUCED landmark achievements in music, art, architecture, and design—as well as l’arte di godersela (the art of enjoying one’s self). Citizens and visitors marveled at the gargantuan Colosseum, the largest amphitheater in the world, and the Pantheon, with its gravity-defying dome. Rome’s artists infused an earthy realism into classic sculpture and painting. As literacy spread, letters, poems, and pamphlets washed over the city like the Tiber at flood tide. Satirists and historians raised literature to a new level, while cultured ladies penned romantic verses and heartbroken swains wrote tearful odes to lost loves.
Romans also elevated everyday life to a loftier plane, surrounding themselves with the superbly crafted statues, vases, and mosaics we go to museums to admire. Music echoed through their pleasure palaces. Goblets and platters of gold decked their tables. Sumptuous tapestries draped their walls.
“Nothing was purely utilitarian,” a historian observed, “for life was not meant to be sordid.” This passion for beauty in all things, lost for centuries in the Dark Ages, would blossom again in the resplendent Renaissance.
During the Romans’ social evolution, a revolutionary new religion emerged, preaching of unconditional love on earth and everlasting life in heaven. It would pit the entire pantheon of ancient gods against a bloodied man on a cross, cosmic warriors versus a cult of unarmed Jesus lovers. Christ would face Caesar in the arena—and would carry the day.
Glory took on a different scent, and something new dawned with the Roman sun.