There are two opposed modern beliefs about homosexuality—or gay sex, or all-male sex, or whatever euphemism happens to be fashionable this decade—in the ancient world generally, and in the Roman Empire in particular.

The first belief is that ancient civilisation fizzled out in an orgy of bum fun, and that we must therefore be vigilant lest the same fate befall us. This view is favoured by various kinds of nostalgic authoritarian who imagine that civilisations are held together by sexual repression, and that the fall of Rome was essentially a failure of continence. The second belief is that the ancient world was one vast al-fresco bathhouse: an enlightened paradise of fluid desire and liberated bodies, ruined by the arrival of Christianity with its desert hatreds and priestly obsessions. This view is favoured by modern progressives, queer theorists, and academics who require historical validation for their own sexual politics.

Though these beliefs are held by opposed factions, they are not opposites in any serious sense. They are mirror images. Both are attempts to conscript the ancient world into modern moral argument. Both are expressions not of what appears to have been the case, but of what we would like to have been the case. Both collapse under even modest scrutiny of the evidence.

The ancients did not organise their sexual lives around identity or self-expression. They did not ask who one was, but what one did, and—more importantly—to whom, in what role, and with what consequences. The result is a sexual culture that is entirely resistant to modern moralisation.

Let us begin with the first belief: that ancient civilisation collapsed because its rulers were too busy sodomising one another to defend their frontiers. Where does one even start with a claim so completely unmoored from common sense? The only honest approach is to look at the evidence—and then to observe how stubbornly it refuses to cooperate.

Alexander the Great had male lovers. So did Julius Caesar, who was mocked for it by his enemies and elected anyway. So did Mark Antony. So did Hadrian, who openly adored Antinous and deified him after his death, erecting statues to him across the empire. The classical Athenians—whose military and cultural achievements modern Europeans like to appropriate when convenient—were notorious for institutionalised male–male erotic relationships, particularly among the elite. Euripides was said to prefer boys. So were many others.

Where, precisely, is the moral rot? Where the civilisational exhaustion? The Macedonian phalanx did not disintegrate because Alexander loved Hephaestion. The Roman legions did not lose their discipline because Caesar had slept with Nicomedes. If Mark Antony came to a bad end, it was not because he had once enjoyed male lovers, but because he married an ambitious foreign woman and lost a civil war.

The idea that Rome collapsed because its elites were sexually decadent belongs with the theory that it collapsed because people stopped believing in Jupiter. It is an explanation that satisfies a sermon, not a historian.

A prejudice against all-male sex does indeed become visible in the fourth century, when Constantine the Great established Christianity as the favoured religion of the Empire and began to legislate accordingly. Constantine issued the first imperial laws against male–male sexual acts. Within a century, the Goths had crossed the Rhine and sacked Rome. This temporal sequence can be paraded as proof of causation.

But correlation is not explanation. Rome did not collapse because Constantine disapproved of sodomy. It collapsed because the Empire had already been battered by demographic catastrophe, fiscal exhaustion, endemic war, and repeated pandemics. The Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian devastated population levels. A mild but persistent climatic cooling lowered agricultural yields across the Mediterranean. Rural impoverishment increased vulnerability to disease. Frontiers drawn in an age of expansion became indefensible in an age of contraction. The barbarians did not burst through in irresistible hordes; they drifted, in small bands, into a demographic vacuum.

Ancient civilisation did not fall because its rulers were worn out from buggering each other.

The second modern belief—that the ancient world was a kind of homoerotic utopia—is no less false, and in some ways still more absurd. It depends on an almost wilful refusal to examine the social structures within which ancient sexual practices took place. I once watched a television documentary in which it was seriously claimed that heterosexual sex had gone out of fashion in classical Athens. One wondered what the researchers thought had been happening to the birth-rate. A more charitable response is to examine the material conditions of ancient societies.

Ancient Greece and Rome were high-mortality societies. Infant death was common. Adult death was frequent. War was endemic. Free men were therefore expected—indeed compelled—to marry and beget children. Legitimate offspring were not a lifestyle choice, but a civic necessity. States that did not reproduce themselves ceased to exist.

This is why bachelors were penalised and fathers rewarded. Men who would not breed were sometimes punished. Men who could not were expected to adopt the surplus children of poorer relatives. The ancient world was many things, but it was not indifferent to demography. Within this framework, what mattered was not the gender of one’s sexual partners, but whether one fulfilled one’s reproductive duty and maintained public dignity. This is where modern readers so often lose the plot.

The ancients did not have a concept of sexual orientation. There is no Greek or Latin word meaning “homosexual” in the modern sense. There are, however, dozens of words describing sexual acts and roles, and they are extraordinarily precise. Latin distinguishes the irrumator (one who presents his penis for sucking) from the fellator (one who sucks); the pathicus (the passive partner in anal sex) from the active partner; the cinaedus (often a male prostitute or effeminate man); the catamitus (a boy lover); the glabrarius (lover of smooth-skinned boys); the exoletus (a sexually available youth); the tribas (a woman with a clitoris imagined large enough to penetrate). Greek vocabulary is even richer. What neither language possesses is a word meaning “gay.”

What mattered was role. To penetrate was to act; to be penetrated was to submit. A free adult male who took the passive role disgraced himself. Not because he loved men, but because he behaved like a woman or a slave. Sexual morality was therefore a subset of social hierarchy.

This is why invective literature is so obsessed with passivity. Consider this epigram of Martial:

Secti podicis usque ad umbilicum
Nullas reliquias habet Charinus
Et prurit tamen usque ad umbilicum.
O quanta scabie miser laborat:
Culum non habet, est tamen cinaedus.

The point is not that Charinus enjoys sex with men. Martial himself boasts elsewhere of sleeping with boys and scolds his wife for objecting. The point is that Charinus is publicly known as passive. He has failed as a man.

In Athens and other classical city-states, elite men were expected to have erotic relationships with adolescent boys. This was not liberation. It was regulation. The rules were explicit. The older partner was active; the younger was to resist penetration. Sex was officially limited to intercrural friction or mutual masturbation. Anal penetration and fellatio were condemned—not because they were sinful, but because they feminised citizens and blurred status distinctions.

Everyone knew these rules were broken in private. What mattered was that they were observed in public. When scandals erupted, it was because the truth had become visible. Periander of Corinth kept a boy as his lover. One day, in public, he poked the boy in the stomach and asked why he was not yet pregnant. The boy, humiliated beyond endurance, murdered the tyrant. The offence here was not sex, but disgrace.

Then there is slavery, which modern admirers of ancient sexual tolerance prefer not to discuss. A Roman slave had no sexual autonomy. A master could demand whatever he pleased, from slaves of either sex and any age, and expect silence. Even physical injury did not excuse refusal. Sexual use of slaves was not regarded as morally problematic. It was regarded as ordinary.

Seneca the Younger recounts the story of Hostius, a wealthy man who used slaves of both sexes for elaborate sexual performances, choosing them with a ruler and installing mirrors so that he could watch himself in action. Seneca condemns Hostius not for using slaves sexually, but for excess and bad taste. The scandal is aesthetic, not ethical.

Likewise in Petronius’ Satyricon, Trimalchio recalls his early life as a slave:

Tamen ad delicias ipsimi annos quattuordecim fui. Nec turpe est, quod dominus iubet.

There is no hint that the master’s behaviour was wrong. The shame lies only in being a slave.

Roman cities were filled with brothels, mostly staffed by slaves, many offering every sexual act imaginable. Prostitution was legal, taxed, and ubiquitous. Christian moralists warned believers away not primarily because of sin, but because a man might unknowingly sleep with his own exposed and enslaved bastard children. This was not hysteria. Infant exposure was common. Sexual slavery was routine. Again, the ancient world does not flatter us.

Lesbianism and the Missing Penis

Ancient writers say little about sex between women. This is not because it was rare, but because it barely registered as sex. Without an ejaculating penis, many ancients did not regard sexual activity as having occurred at all. Sappho is famous to us because we are obsessed with her sexuality. The ancients were not. When women are mocked for sexual activity with other women, as in Martial’s epigrams about Philaenis, the ridicule is directed not at desire but at gender inversion. The offence is that a woman behaves like a man.

This also explains why lesbian affairs were not generally regarded as adultery. Adultery was about paternity, not fidelity.

Finally, there is the wider hypothesis—one that will offend both moral absolutists and modern sentimentalists—that tolerance or intolerance of all-male sex tracks demographic conditions, not moral insight.

Sexual morality, in every society that has left records, is downstream of reproduction. It is shaped less by theology than by arithmetic. When population is stable or expanding, surplus seed can be wasted with relative impunity. A man may indulge his appetites without threatening the survival of his household or the fiscal base of the state. Moralists grumble, satirists sneer, but legislators mostly look the other way. The seed may be “wasted,” but there is plenty of it. When population collapses, indulgence becomes crime.

This is not a metaphor. It is an administrative fact. States that cannot replace themselves die, and elites who understand this—however dimly—begin to concern themselves with what had previously been regarded as private choice. Sexual behaviour is dragged out of the bedroom and into the forum, not because anyone has discovered new moral truths, but because the supply of bodies has become precarious.

Late antiquity provides the textbook case. From the later second century onwards, the Roman world was battered by demographic catastrophe: repeated pandemics, falling fertility, rural abandonment, and declining life expectancy. Labour shortages became endemic. Tax bases shrank. Military recruitment faltered. Land went untilled. The empire did not merely feel itself weakening. It could count the corpses.

It is at this point—not earlier—that hostility to all-male sex hardens into law. The crucial moment is not the rise of Christianity as a belief system, but its adoption by the state at a time of panic. Christianity supplied a ready-made moral vocabulary: sin, nature, disorder, divine wrath. What it did not supply was the motive. That motive was demographic collapse.

Under Constantine the Great and his successors, sexual behaviour became a matter of public concern in a way it had not been under the pagan emperors. The state suddenly cared how men used their bodies, because it needed those bodies to reproduce, to labour, to fight. What had once been indulgence was reclassified as sabotage.

This explains both the timing and the intensity of late Roman sexual legislation far better than any story about moral enlightenment or moral degradation. If Christianity had been adopted in the age of Augustus, when population was rising and frontiers were expanding, its sexual prohibitions would almost certainly have been enforced sporadically or not at all—much as other inconvenient moral teachings were quietly ignored. Instead, it became the perfect ideological tool for a state facing extinction by arithmetic.

The same pattern recurs elsewhere, with monotonous regularity. In the early medieval period, after the collapse of Roman authority, population slowly recovered. Land was abundant. Labour was scarce. Sexual discipline relaxed in practice, whatever the sermons said. All-male sex appears frequently in monastic and courtly contexts, usually condemned in theory and tolerated in fact. There were bodies to spare.

After the Black Death, the pattern reverses. Europe loses perhaps a third to a half of its population. Labour shortages become acute. States compete for settlers. Sexual discipline hardens. Laws against sodomy are enforced with new ferocity. What had previously been a sin becomes a capital crime. Moral panic follows the corpse cart.

The Victorian example is equally instructive. Nineteenth-century Britain experienced unprecedented imperial expansion combined with settlement opportunities on a continental scale. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa—vast territories required people. Emigration was state policy. Reproduction was patriotic duty. Sexual non-conformity became not merely immoral, but un-British. The hysteria surrounding male homosexuality in the later nineteenth century cannot be understood apart from this context. It was not about love. It was about numbers.

By contrast, in periods of demographic pressure in the opposite direction—urban congestion, surplus labour, declining wages—tolerance mysteriously reappears. We are living through such a period now. Western states are bursting at the seams. Labour is cheap. Human life is treated as surplus. Under these conditions, sexual behaviour that does not produce children ceases to be a problem and may even be encouraged. The moral language shifts accordingly.

None of this is to say that demography explains everything. It does not. Cultural and religious systems acquire autonomy. Once moral rules are codified, they develop their own internal logic and can persist long after the conditions that produced them have vanished. Christianity continued to condemn sodomy even when medieval population growth made such condemnation economically irrational. Modern liberalism celebrates sexual non-reproduction even where fertility collapse threatens social continuity.

But demography explains why certain moral obsessions arise when they do, and why they harden into law at particular moments rather than others. It explains why hostility to all-male sex crystallises in late antiquity rather than earlier, why it intensifies after population shocks, and why moral panics so often coincide with labour shortages, settlement drives, and state anxiety about reproduction.

The ancients did not think in terms of “sexual identity,” but they understood scarcity. When bodies were plentiful, they tolerated waste. When bodies were scarce, they moralised seed.

This is not a pleasant conclusion. It does not flatter our modern belief that moral progress is linear or that our values are chosen freely. But it has the advantage of fitting the evidence—and of reminding us that sexual morality, like so much else, is often a euphemism for survival.

Bibliography

Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Cantarella, Eva. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. Translated by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Dover, Kenneth J. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Glancy, Jennifer A. Slavery in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Harper, Kyle. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

McGinn, Thomas A. J. The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Petronius. The Satyricon. Translated by J. P. Sullivan. London: Penguin, 1986.

Seneca. Naturales Quaestiones. Translated by Thomas H. Corcoran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Veyne, Paul. Sex and Power in Ancient Rome. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 

 

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