They weren't like usby W. V. Harris inThe Times Literary Supplement, 28th. April, 2000, pages 5-6. "e;After a notorious banquet at which he had terrorized 'the leading senators and knights' who were his guests, the Emperor Domitian made amends by sending them, among other gifts, the good-looking slave boys, who, naked and painted black, had performed a ballet (they were meant to be ghosts). He knew his subjects' sexual tastes. InRoman Homosexuality: Ideologies of masculinity in classical antiquity, Craig Williams shows conclusively, on the basis of a rich variety of material (though, oddly, not this story), that a high proportion of Roman upper-class males shared a taste for having sex with slave boys. Nor did they pretend otherwise."e;"e;It has taken a terribly long time to get this matter sorted out. Not that scholars have always had their eyes closed.A. E. Housman, nearly a century ago, wrote that the Romans 'saw no inconguity' between love of women and love of boys (adding that they distinguished between an active and a passive role). The great pioneer in the study of Roman sexual behaviour was Housman's contemporary Wilhelm Kroll (1869-1939). But within the past decade, scholars have told us, and asserted under oath in the 1993 Colorado lawsuitRomer vs Evans, either that the Romans generally deplored homosexuality as a Greek vice, or alternatively that they regarded it with complete equanimity."e;
"e;With extraordinary clarity and persuasiveness, Williams shows that in the upper class, at least, the normal adult male was expected to desire insertive sex with young males, but that the social code permitted him such pleasures only with his own slaves. It was held to be highly dishonourable, on the other hand, for a man to experience sexual penetration. So the concept 'homosexuality' itself turns out to be a large part of the historical problem - the Romans had no attitude to it one way or the other, because their own concepts were on a different plane. In consequence, Williams is somewhat sheepish about the title of his book, saying that he is 'reifying' the concept of homosexuality 'only temporarily and for strategic purposes'."e;
"e;One effect ofRoman Homosexualityought to be the final disappearance of the historical mirage, beloved ofJohn Boswelland others, in which the Roman elite enjoyed a world substantially free of hang-ups about homoerotic acts. For the restrictions were severe: unless they were prostitutes, even other people's slaves were out of bounds. And, though Williams will not admit the fact, there was a law, rarely enforced, it is true, but indicative of what had once been proper thinking, that rather plainly forbade sexual acts with freeborn boys and perhaps with adult males too."e;
"e;But what of thecinaedi, whom some recent scholars have taken to be Rome's 'homosexuals'? Williams rightly rejects this identification, but then, in the face of admittedly confusing evidence, tells us that thecinaediwere (male) 'gender deviants'. He forces a handful of texts to yield the notion thatcinaediwere sometimes imagined to be adulterers. But we should understand the word to refer primarily to men who made public their desire for 'passive' homoerotic roles. Which implies the unsurprising conclusion that quite a number of Roman men who desired 'active' sex with other males were not satisfied with their own slaves or with pristitutes and sought pleasure elsewhere."e;