Ancient Rome

Lore & Background

Ancient Rome was a civilization that began as an Italic settlement beside the River Tiber on the Italian Peninsula, traditionally founded in the 8th century BC. It grew from a small settlement into the city of Rome, expanding control over neighbors through treaties and military strength, eventually dominating the entire Italian Peninsula. It absorbed the Greek culture of Magna Graecia in the south and the Etruscan culture in the north-central region. At its height, the empire covered the North African coast, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas, most of Southern and Western Europe, and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia, and Crimea. It was among the largest ancient empires, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants, roughly 20% of the world’s population at the time. The state evolved from an elective monarchy to a classical republic, then to an increasingly autocratic military dictatorship during the Empire. Roman civilization is grouped with ancient Greece as the Greco-Roman world, contributing to language, religion, society, technology, law, politics, government, warfare, art, literature, architecture, and engineering. Rome professionalized its military and created a system of government that inspired modern republics. It achieved technological and architectural feats, including empire-wide aqueducts, roads, and grand monuments. The Romans themselves had a founding myth involving Romulus and Remus, with the city’s foundation dated to 753 BC by the antiquarian Varro. Another legend, recorded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, tells of Prince Aeneas leading Trojans to the Tiber, where a woman named Roma burned their ships, leading them to name the settlement after her.

Reader's Guide

Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement beside the River Tiber, traditionally founded in the 8th century BC, and grew through treaties and military strength to dominate its neighbours. It eventually controlled the entire Italian Peninsula, absorbing Greek culture from Magna Graecia and Etruscan culture from north-central Italy. At its height around AD 117, the empire covered roughly 5 million square kilometres, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants—about 20% of the world’s population. The Roman state evolved from an elective monarchy into a classical republic, then into an increasingly autocratic military dictatorship during the Empire. Rome’s system of government, the res publica, inspired modern republics like the United States and France. Its professionalised and expanded military, along with technological and architectural achievements such as aqueducts, roads, and grand monuments, were hallmarks of its power. Roman civilisation assimilated Greek and Etruscan influences, forming the Greco-Roman world, and contributed enduringly to language, religion, society, law, politics, warfare, art, literature, architecture, and engineering. The empire’s vast territory included the North African coast, Iberian and Balkan peninsulas, most of Southern and Western Europe, and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia, and Crimea.

Did You Know?

• The censors had the power to remove citizens from the senatorial or equestrian order for sexual misconduct, and on occasion did so.
• After the Battle of Carrhae, the Parthians were reportedly shocked to find the Milesiaca, a collection of salacious stories, in the baggage of Marcus Crassus's officers.
• The Augustan poet Horace supposedly had a mirrored room for sex, so that when he hired a prostitute he could watch from all angles.
• The emperor Tiberius had his bedrooms decorated with the most lascivious paintings and sculptures, and stocked with Greek sex manuals by Elephantis.
• A series of paintings from the Suburban Baths at Pompeii, discovered in 1986 and published in 1995, presents erotic scenarios including a variety of positions, oral sex, and group sex featuring male–female, male–male, and female–female relations.

Social Regulation and the Architecture of Restraint

The popular image of ancient Rome as a place of boundless sexual freedom is, according to the evidence, a significant oversimplification. Sexuality fell squarely within the domain of the mos maiorum, the web of traditional social norms that governed public conduct, private life, and even military discipline. Pudor, a concept encompassing shame and modesty, functioned as a daily behavioral check, reinforced by legal codes that punished specific sexual transgressions throughout both the Republic and the Empire. The censors, those magistrates charged with maintaining the social register, held the extraordinary authority to strip a citizen of his senatorial or equestrian rank on grounds of sexual misconduct, and historical records confirm they exercised that power. The mid-twentieth-century thinker Michel Foucault, examining the broader Greco-Roman world, argued that sexual life was less about prohibition than about a cultivated art of managing pleasure within socially acceptable boundaries.

Gender, Status, and the Grammar of Desire

Roman sexual culture was organized around a rigid hierarchy of status and a sharply defined gender binary. Masculinity rested on the capacity to govern, over enemies in war, over the state in politics, and over those of lower rank in the bedroom. The ideal of virtus, etymologically tied to vir (man), demanded active self-mastery. For women, the corresponding virtue was pudicitia, a quality that blended attractiveness with disciplined self-control and carried a competitive edge among upper-class matrons, who were expected to be educated, strong-willed, and actively engaged in preserving their family's social position. Crucially, the modern categories of homosexual and heterosexual simply did not exist in Roman thought; no Latin terms for them survive. What mattered was the role: a free male citizen engaging in sexual relations with a woman or a man of inferior status, typically a slave or a prostitute, was generally tolerated, provided he assumed the active, penetrating role and displayed no sign of weakness or excess. Perceived effeminacy, by contrast, was a political and social scandal, routinely weaponized in public rhetoric.

Voices on the Page and the Wall

The surviving literary record of Roman sexual life is uneven and heavily mediated. Elevated genres like epic and tragedy say relatively little; the richer material lives in comedy, satire, invective, love poetry, graffiti, magic spells, and interior decoration. Plautus (d. 184 BC) built entire comedies around young lovers separated by circumstance. Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC) wove Epicurean sexual philosophy into his De rerum natura. Catullus (fl. 50s BC) ranged from tender romanticism to viciously obscene attacks on his contemporaries. Cicero (d. 43 BC) attacked opponents' sexual conduct in courtroom speeches and filled letters with gossip about Rome's elite. Ovid (d. 17 AD) wrote the Amores and Ars Amatoria, which according to tradition contributed to Augustus's decision to exile the poet, and the Metamorphoses, which presents a range of sexuality with an emphasis on rape through mythology. Martial (d. c. 102/4 AD) and Juvenal (d. early 2nd century AD) later sharpened their pens with sexually explicit invective. Beyond Rome, Greek sex manuals published under the names of famous courtesans circulated widely, and the Milesiaca of Aristides was translated into Latin by Sisenna, one of the praetors of 78 BC. After the Battle of Carrhae, the Parthians were reportedly shocked to find the Milesiaca in the baggage of Marcus Crassus's officers. Erotic paintings, preserved in Pompeii and Herculaneum, adorned the most respectable houses of the Roman nobility, including, in the Imperial era, former slaves.

Religion, Law, and the Limits of Modern Categories

Several features of Roman sexual culture stand in stark contrast to later Western norms. Roman religion treated sexuality as an aspect of prosperity for the state, and individuals could turn to private religious practice or magic for improving their erotic lives or reproductive health. Prostitution was legal, public, and widespread. Pornographic paintings were featured among the art collections in respectable upper-class households. The very absence of Latin words for homosexual and heterosexual signals that Roman minds did not parse sexual experience along that axis. A late-20th-century scholarly model attempted to reduce Roman sexual relations to a penetrator-penetrated binary, yet this framework has limitations, especially in regard to expressions of sexuality among individual Romans. Scholars have even questioned whether the modern concept of sexuality maps cleanly onto the ancient world, though in the absence of any other label for the cultural interpretation of erotic experience, the term continues to be used. Legal texts point to behaviors Romans wanted to regulate or prohibit, without necessarily reflecting what people actually did or refrained from doing.