If you only need to know one thing about Roman attitudes towards sex, it’s that the Romans have given us the word “vagina”, which literally translates as the sheath of one’s sword.
Macho and militaristic to the core, elite Roman culture revolved as much around a man’s ability to flaunt his sexual prowess as around scoring points against his rivals by throwing shade on theirs. Since many of Rome’s early emperors had to navigate uneasy relationships with the elite, and it was the elite who wrote the histories, the sex lives of the Caesars survive as templates for debauchery, degeneracy and sadistic cruelty (in the literature the three are often indistinguishable).
But how much of what we think we know is true?
This article tries to get to grips with sexual anecdotes from Suetonius’ “Lives of the Twelve Caesars”, a biographical work from the early second century CE. If you read only one book from ancient Rome, read Suetonius. His biographies preserve some of the most shocking and disturbing anecdotes from ancient history: from the emperor Tiberius’ “litte fishes” — infants he taught to swim between his legs and nibble at his genitalia on Capri — to Nero’s deranged sex game, in which he donned the pelt of a wild animal and savaged the genitals of victims he had tied to stakes.
Suetonius was less concerned with history than with the character of his imperial subjects, and scholarship has revealed much of his writing to be fanciful or fictitious. Suetonius was not alone in twisting the truth to fit his agenda. Tacitus, the GOAT of Roman historians, was prone to do the same. Where Tacitus wrote with the authority of a statesman, offering the depth of political observation you would expect from an editor of The Times, Suetonius showed a preoccupation with gossip not dissimilar to a columnist for the Daily Mail.
Suetonius worked at the court of Hadrian towards the end of the first century CE until being dismissed on murky grounds (probably for copping off with the emperor’s wife, Sabina). This is why his early biographies from Caesar to Nero are full, detailed, and brimming with primary sources (letters, quotes, speeches, etc.) while the later biographies are shorter and much more vague.
But by adding historical context, and cross-referencing Suetonius’ stories with those of other writers, we can at least get a feeling for the sexual attitudes of Roman authors — if not for the sex lives of the Caesars themselves.
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Julius Caesar
Better known to history as the penetrated than the penetrator, Julius Caesar was very much both when you got him between the sheets.
Dubbed “the bald adulterer” by his peers, Julius Caesar fit the Roman political stereotype perfectly by sleeping his way to power. As a young man, he spent a brief stint at the court of King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, fuelling a series of rumours about an affair in which Caesar was the submissive party. Caesar’s return to Bithynia just a few days after leaving to “collect a debt” only fanned the flames.
Roman views on homosexuality differed drastically from ours. Our written sources — which we must remember preserve the perspectives of the literary elites — portray gay sex as a power dynamic in which being active was admissible (sometimes even encouraged), but sexual passivity was shameful. Being the ‘bottom’ was stigmatised in every civilian social strata. In the military sphere, Polybius notes the lengths to which the Republican army of the second century BCE went to discourage sex among the legions.
“Among the most disgraceful acts is that of a soldier being accused of having allowed himself to be abused (paiderastein). If such an accusation is proven, the punishment is death by cudgelling (fustuarium).”
Polybius, 6.37
The Romans’ rationale for this, as we can glean from Livy, is that any soldier who made his body vulnerable to sexual pleasure would be more exposed to the enemy on the battlefield (though given the tightly-packed formation of the legionary infantry, you’d expect him to he more vulnerable to a reach-around from behind).
Given the stigma association with being the ‘bottom’, it’s interesting that Caesar should have tarnished his reputation early on by submitting sexually to a foreign king. Whether he really did, we will likely never know. What we do know is that although Suetonius tells us that this was the only stain on Caesar’s masculinity, it was one that would prove difficult to wash out.
During Caesar’s quadruple military triumph in Rome (46 BCE) celebrating his victories over Gaul, Pontus, Africa and Egypt, his soldiers chanted, “Caesar might have conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered him!” A colleague, Bibulus, once addressed Caesar as “the queen of Bithynia.” During an assembly, a consul named Octavius hailed Pompey as “king” and Caesar as “queen”. Gaius Scribonius Curio, an orator and outspoken opponent of Caesar, called Caesar “a man to every woman and a woman to every man”. Even the great Cicero couldn’t resist a dig, writing that it was on a Bithynian couch that Caesar, the son of Venus, had lost his virginity.
“A man to every woman and a woman to every man”
Caesar behaved just as badly after becoming an established general (imperator) — veni, vidi, vici applying as much to his sexual escapades as to his military conquests. As his soldier’s chanted at his triumph:
“Men of Rome, look out for your wives, we’re bringing the bald adulterer home. In Gaul you fucked your way through a fortune, which you borrowed here in Rome.”
Suetonius, Life of Caesar, 51
A modern reader might interpret this, the ancient equivalent of a football chant, as a reference to Caesar sleeping with prostitutes, captives or slaves while away on campaign in Gaul. Caesar was indeed married to Calpurnia, his third wife, and so the charge of adultery would fit today’s definition.
But there was no law preventing a man from having sex with prostitutes. Any children they bore could not dilute the family bloodline with illegitimate children, destabilise the social order, or threaten inheritance-related conflict among heirs. Slaves had fewer protections. Legally, the Romans did not consider slaves as people, but as property, and so having sex with another man’s slave would constitute a violation of his property rather than an act of adultery. No sexual conquest of Caesar’s could therefore have been with someone with whom he could have committed adultery — unless the reference was not to Caesar sleeping with slaves or prostitutes but with respectable Roman wives.
This chimes well with what we know about Caesar’s sex life elsewhere, and suggests there was a good reason for men to lock up their wives (and, indeed, daughters) with Caesar back in the capital. He had slept his way through the ranks and file of aristocratic Roman women, even seducing the wives of fellow consuls and political allies. His most famous affair was with Servilia — played brilliantly by Lindsay Duncan in HBO’s Rome — who was the half-sister of Cato the Younger and mother of Brutus (yes, that Brutus) and whom Caesar was rumoured to have bought an outrageously expensive pearl worth six million sesterces.
Caesar was married three times: to Cornelia (died in 69 BCE, perhaps in childbirth), to Pompeia (whom he divorced after she became embroiled in a scandal in 62 BCE, giving rise to the saying “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion”) and to Calpurnia, who would survive him.
As we shall see, few of the Caesars stayed married for long.
But no conquest could compare to his famous fling with Queen Cleopatra (48 BCE), who forced their introduction by having herself smuggled into his palace wrapped in a carpet. Cleopatra clearly made an impression. Within nine months, she gave birth to their son, Caesarion, an unfortunate child who would fall victim to the purges of Caesar’s successor, Octavian.
Augustus
Despite sharing many of his Caesar’s sexual proclivities, Augustus, his successor, enjoyed a much better reputation — at least by ancient standards. Throughout his life, Augustus (or Octavian as he was called before becoming emperor) used sex in a thoroughly Roman way: as a means of obtaining power and exercising dominance.
Politically, this justified his homosexual escapades towards the beginning of his career, most famously with Aulus Hirtius, a consul and military writer by whom Octavian allowed himself to be buggered for the bargain-basement price of three hundred thousand sesterces.
The man who would remind Octavian of this repeatedly was Lucius Antonius, the brother of Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony). Once Octavian’s co-consul, and brother-in-law by marriage to Octavia, Mark Antony would become his bitter rival until being defeated at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. We shouldn’t be too surprised that Mark Antony and his allies sought to portray Octavian as sexually submissive and effete. As someone rumoured to have driven a chariot led by lions, Antony was regarded as the quintessential Roman: bold, brash – a military man through and through.
Antony knew full well that in the thoroughly macho culture of the Roman elite, the best way to trash-talk your opponent was by emphasising his effeminacy. Hence why he alleged that Octavian had only earned Caesar’s favour by sleeping with him, why Lucius Antonius claimed that Octavian singed his legs with roasting nutshells to soften the hairs, and why Sextus Pompey — another dynast who fought against Octavian — taunted Octavian as a man given to effeminacy (mollitia).
It was not just Octavian’s submission to men that his enemies picked up on. Not even Octavian’s allies could deny his proclivity for adultery, although they stressed that he was motivated by politics rather than passion. In what appears to us today as being a bare demonstration of power, Augustus (as Octavian would be known when emperor) was once said to have taken the wife of an ex-consul from a banqueting table to his bedroom, returning with her a while later, her hair dishevelled and her ears glowing. (Curiously, Suetonius would level exactly the same charge as the archetypal “bad” emperor Caligula). The emperor’s friends would routinely procure women for him and, like slave dealers, strip them down for him to inspect and select. Most shockingly, his later wife, Livia, would do the same, but exclusively to satisfy his penchant for deflowering virgins.
Augustus had three wives but was faithful to none, a recurring pattern in the sex lives of the Caesars. His first, Clodia Pulchra, he divorced to cement a political alliance with the family of his second, Scribonia. However, feeling that Scribonia nagged him too much, he divorced her too as soon as she had given birth to their daughter Julia.
Augustus would later exile Julia to the Pontine island of Pandateria (modern-day Ventotene) in 2 BCE. Our sources cite treason as the reason. But in all likelihood, Julia was exiled for her serial adultery, which seriously (if not somewhat hypocritically) undermined Augustus’ family-oriented marriage policies of 18 BCE.
Augustus’ third wife was Livia, and their relationship was about as far from a Taylor Swift-esque Love Story as it’s possible to imagine. Their marriage, rather than built on romance, was more a political alliance, a relationship of political pragmatism instead of passion.
More Lord and Lady Macbeth than Romeo and Juliet.
Tiberius
Tiberius holds pride of place as the most perverted among the Pantheon of Rome’s early emperors.
As a young man, Tiberius was relatively restrained, as he had to be amidst the prying eyes of the capital as a potential heir apparent. It was only during his self-imposed exile in the Villa of Jupiter on the island of Capri (where millions of tourists still flock every year) that he fully let loose in sexual deviance.
Suetonius tells us that the walls of the imperial palace were awash with pornographic imagery, much like that still on display inside the brothel (lupanar) in Pompeii. With these scenes as his backdrop, Tiberius would command his “tight bums” — groups of young boys whose “talents” are clear from the name — to perform threesomes in front of him to stimulate his flagging libido.
From sexual depravity to stripped-down sadism, at banquets Tiberius would ply his drinking companions with wine before tying ligatures around their penises to prevent them from pissing.
But it was for his paedophilia that Tiberius is most notorious. According to Suetonius, Tiberius trained infants he called his “little fish” to swim between his thighs while he took a bath and nibble on his genitalia. And that’s not even the most heinous charge laid against him. We’re also told that he would take newborn babies from their mothers and hold them to his genitals, hoping they would suckle as if upon their mother’s breast. Tiberius buggered two boys during a sacrificial ceremony on Capri, and when they complained, he had their legs broken. He also sexually assaulted aristocratic women, causing one woman, Mallonia, such trauma that she was driven to suicide.
In old age, Tiberius was hairy and pungent, and theatrical audiences would taunt him by chanting “the old goat is licking the old does’ asses”. Given that in Latin the word for goat is caprea, and the name of the island Capri may derive from the goats that wander its hills, contemporary references to Tiberius’s twisted pleasure palace on Capri as “the old goat’s garden” is a pun that would have been lost on no one.
We’ll never know exactly to what extent these stories about Tiberius’s sexual depravity were true. There is, I suspect, a kernel of truth. The weight of evidence and the cohesion of out sources make complete fabrication extremely unlikely. But Tiberius was hated by the Roman elite — far more than his predecessor Augustus had been. And we would do well to bear in mind that it was the Roman elite, whose tradition survives in the writings of Suetonius, Tacitus and Cassius Dio.
Suetonius’ “Life of Tiberius” was written while still at court, when he still had access to letters, memoirs, and other court documents. Suetonius’ bias is clear. Yet he may capture more of Tiberius’ character than we would like to think. Yet there also existed a more balanced portrayal of life on Capri almost completely missing from Suetonius’ text.
Tiberius was a highly educated man, deeply interested in Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and astrology. While on Capri, he continued to correspond with the Senate and intellectual figures in Rome, wrote treatises on grammar and a history of the Etruscans (these works have been lost), and engaged in debates and discussions with prominent thinkers of the time. He even spent a sleepless night worrying about a grammatical error in an edict he had published, calling in experts the next morning to put his mind at ease.
Of course, it’s quite possible that Tiberius engaged in academia and paedophilia, studying by day and sodomising by night. But we should be careful in thinking that life on Capri was 24/7 debauchery — if anything for matters of stamina rather than cruelty.
Caligula
Known to history as Caligula (meaning “little boots” after the military attire his father paraded him in as an infant), Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus endured an upbringing that all but condemned him to a life of cruelty and depravity.
Most of Caligula’s family fell victim to the political intrigues of the Tiberian regime, perishing from poison, starvation, or suicide. At the age of just eighteen, Caligula was sent to live with his uncle Tiberius on the island of Capri, and in constant fear of death, the teenager learned how to dissimulate. Caligula showed nothing but indifference towards his uncle’s cruelty and sexual depravity. Such was his reputation for appeasing Tiberius, and hiding his true feelings towards the man that had killed his family, that it would come to be said of Caligula that “never was there a better slave or a worse master.”
When Tiberius died on 16 March 37 CE, many had reason to believe Caligula had helped him on his way. But since Tiberius had been so unpopular, few seemed to mind. For Caligula’s first few months as emperor, everything went well. The Romans were delighted to have the son of the dashing Germanicus on the throne, and believed a new Golden Age had dawned. But in October that same year, Caligula fell seriously ill. Few believed that he would recover, and those in positions of power probably started plotting his succession. When the emperor finally resurfaced, all semblance of normality had gone and he revealed his true, evil nature.
Suetonius tells us that Caligula habitually committed incest with his sisters, once spit-roasting himself between them and his wife during a grand banquet. Such was his infatuation with one sister, Drusilla, that in childhood he deflowered her, and in adulthood, he abducted her from her husband, Cassius Longinus, before publicly parading her as his wife.
The incest accusations are most likely fabricated.
Not only do no contemporary writers mention them but they also fit in well with Caligula’s portrayal as an eastern-style Hellenistic despot. Similar to one of the Egyptian Ptolemies, who married and interbred with their sisters (all of whom, conveniently, were called Cleopatra).
We should also keep in mind that accusations of incest were common in political invective against rival public figures. But while Caligula may not have been incestuous, it’s likely that, as Suetonius suggests, he did routinely use sex as a way of demonstrating his power.
Following in the footsteps of Augustus, Caligula would insist that aristocratic women accompany their husbands to his banquets. Over dinner, he would make them pass by his couch while he examined them like livestock, commenting on their physical attributes and forcing those who looked away to meet his eyes. He would then retire to his chambers before sending for the woman who had pleased him most. Later, when she returned flushed and dishevelled, Caligula would evaluate her performance in front of her husband, pointing out both the positive and negative aspects of her sexual performance.
On one occasion, he even forced a consul’s wife to divorce her husband, sending him the divorce bill personally.
Caligula is alleged to have had several homosexual relations — another common charge in the sex lives of the Caesars. His most notable fling was with the patrician Valerius Catullus (who admitted quite publicly to being absolutely exhausted by the emperor’s sexual demands). But Caligula was also strongly attracted to the pantomime actor Mnester, whom he would rush up and kiss during the middle of his performances. For context, actors in ancient Rome were seen as the lowest of the low, socially on a par with prostitutes and gladiators. Seeing the emperor shamelessly making out with one on stage would have been the Roman equivalent of watching King Charles II tonguing a nipple-tasselled stripper during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, only even more shocking.
Most of all, Caligula made no distinction between sensuality and cruelty. Whenever kissing the neck of a lover, he would remark that, with one command, he could have it severed at his pleasure. Ultimately, Caligula would take his taunting too far, and in 41 CE he got himself assassinated by Cassius Chaerea, whom the emperor had mocked for his effeminacy and high-pitched voice.
Claudius
We would probably pay more attention to Claudius’s sex life if it didn’t completely pale into insignificance when compared to that of his wife, Messalina.
What Messalina managed to get away with is absolutely astounding if we suspend disbelief and follow our ancient sources. Pliny the Elder records that she held a competition in the imperial palace with one of Rome’s most notorious prostitutes to see how many men they could sleep with in a day.
Needless to say, Messalina came out on top: after non-stop intercourse day and night her final headcount was 25 to her opponent’s 24.
And that’s not all.
In one of his satires, the poet Juvenal has her working surreptitiously at a local brothel; “she-wolf” being her nom de guerre.
In 48 CE, Messalina put into action what must go down as one of the worst-planned conspiracies in history. As soon as Claudius had left the capital for a lovely day at the sacrifices down the road in Ostia, his wife Messalina decided the time was right to marry her senatorial lover, Gaius Silius. Up until this point, their affair had hardly been private — so much so, we are told, that she was growing tired of how easy it all was. But as soon as Claudius was out of sight, they celebrated a wedding ceremony, complete with witnesses, sacrifices and, of course, the all-important consummation.
Suffice to say that everything worked out terribly. Without hesitation, the Praetorian Guard arrested Silius and Messalina upon their emperor’s return. Silius was executed immediately while Messalina was held in a cell away from the emperor.
Weak and indecisive when it came to women, Claudius wanted to spare her. But it was advisors who were running the show, and they chose to act differently. They had Messalina put to death.
The only thing that Claudius could say upon receiving news of her death was that he would like some more wine.
Claudius comes across as quite vanilla on the scale of the sex lives of the Caesars. He wasn’t as perverted as his predecessors, but in line with his character, he was astoundingly hypocritical. After Messalina’s death, he addressed his Praetorian Guard and told them that, if he ever married again, they should not hesitate to kill him. Lo and behold, by New Year’s Day 49 CE Claudius was remarried, this time to his niece (Caligula’s sister and Nero’s mother) Agrippina the Younger.
By no strange coincidence, Claudius passed a motion in the Senate later that year which legalised incestuous marriages.
We know next to nothing about Claudius’s sex life with Agrippina. Suetonius tells us that throughout his life he was an ardent lover of women, though he never slept with men. We can assume that this continued during his marriage to Agrippina – Roman emperors not being famous for their marital fidelity.
What we do know is that Agrippina loved power more than her husband. The details are hazy, but their relationship rapidly deteriorated in 54 CE (Claudius was often heard lamenting his lousy choice of wives over the years) and on 13 October, after consuming a plate of poisoned mushrooms, Claudius loudly defecated and died.
And few were in doubt who had killed him.
Nero
Freud would have had a field day with Nero.
Having helped murder his adopted father Claudius, he went on to have what the sources suggest was a fully incestuous relationship with his mother Agrippina. We’re told that whenever they rode together in a litter, the stains on his clothes would betray what they had done.
We are told Agrippina was complicit as she sought to share his power.
Tacitus tells us that she would get him drunk to loosen him up. But being the good historian that he was, Tacitus also offers the view of a contemporary writer, Fabius Rusticus, who had it on good authority that Nero needed no such encouragement.
Nero would ultimately kill his mother in 59. He had initially planned to drown her, sending her out into the bay of Baia on a boat rigged to collapse. But the plan went awry when Agrippina escaped and swam to shore. When Nero panicked and prevaricated, his advisors took charge, sending a group of centurions to finish the job. Realizing her fate as they approached her in her coastal villa, Agrippina pointed to her womb before uttering her final words: “strike here”.
Nero had several wives throughout his short but eventful life. The first, Octavia, he forced to commit suicide. The second, Poppaea Sabina, he kicked to death during her pregnancy after she rebuked him for returning home late from the races. The third was his former mistress, Statilia Messalina, and in 66 Nero forced her unfortunate husband—the consul Marcus Junius Vestinus Atticus—to commit suicide so he could go ahead and marry her. And then there were his male wives, Pythagoras and Sporus.
Pythagoras (not to be confused with the man who invented the theorem) or “Doryphorus” as some sources call him, was one of Nero’s favourite freedmen (or “ex-slaves”). In 64 AD he participated in a bizarre wedding ceremony, marrying Nero who took on the role of the veiled bride. But Pythagoras wasn’t Nero’s only husband. The emperor had another paramour, a young boy called Sporus, who the emperor had castrated and married in 67 CE.
Like his uncle Caligula, he sexually assaulted the wives of senators. Replicating a vice we see often in the sex lives of the Caesars.
Nero also devised an utterly bizarre sex game in which he would dress up in wild animal pelt, sally forth from a cage, and attack the genitalia of men and women who were tied to nearby stakes. Once he’d had enough, he would be run through by his husband, Pythagoras, while moaning, in the words of Suetonius, ‘like a vestal virgin being deflowered.’
Still, nothing should surprise us about someone whose philosophical principle was that no man was truly pure or chaste but merely concealed their vices behind a veil of decency.
It’s hard to establish the truth behind these stories.
Granted Nero was no Mother Theresa. But it’s also hard to reconcile his mother-f*ck*ng, wife-killing, slave-marrying, sexually assaulting, pelt-wearing persona with the fact that he managed to retain power for almost 14 years.
What’s worth remembering is that Nero was the last of a dynasty, and it was in the interests of later writers under subsequent dynasts to blacken his name to the benefit of theirs.
Vitellius
Abnormally tall and fat, with hanging flesh and a face flushed from alcohol, Vitellius’ description is eerily evocative of anyone emerging from the Covid-19 lockdowns of Spring 2020.
Vitellius is also one of the few emperors whose statues perfectly capture what was written about his appearance. He never stopped eating, feasting at least three times a day (excessive for the ancients) while drinking copiously in between. You might assume from this that Vitellius was in no condition to rival the otherwise rampant sex lives of the Caesars.
And you would be right insofar as our sources claim.
It was during his youth that Vitellius earned his sexual notoriety. He spent part of his childhood on Capri with his “friend” and former emperor, Tiberius. I say “friend” in inverted commas because during his time with Tiberius, and for reasons we really don’t need to go into, Vitellius came to acquire the nickname “tight-bum”. In fact, Suetonius tells us that he used his “asset” to great effect, and that the emperor’s access to it secured his father’s political promotion.
After Tiberius’s death, he endeared himself to the emperor Caligula who repaid the favour by driving his chariot into Vitellius and crippling him for life.
After Caligula’s assassination, Vitellius befriended his successor, Claudius (their friendship was founded on a mutual love of gambling). Vitellius even managed to navigate (or should I say hobble) his way through Nero’s reign, taking up the emperor’s theatricality and playing the role of his biggest sycophant. He finally, and briefly, came to power during the civil war of 69 CE (known otherwise as The Year of the Four Emperors). Vitellius, to his misfortune, was the third.
His rule was short and not particularly sweet. He spent his few months in power eating his way around various houses of the Roman aristocracy, being excessively and unnecessarily cruel, and—in order to fulfill a prophecy—starving his mother to death. His administration was guided by the counsel of one Asiaticus, a freedman who Vitellius made a knight. Many said that from a young age, they had been mutual partners in buggery and this explained Asiaticus’s astronomical rise through the imperial court. This may or may not have been true. For Asiaticus’s sake we can only hope, on account of the presumably horrendous gout from which Vitellius suffered, it wasn’t.
Vitellius would meet a particularly nasty end on 22 December 69 CE. Upon the arrival of his rival Vespasian’s army, he was dragged from his hiding place. With his hands bound behind his back and a noose around his neck, he was hauled through the streets—the whole time being pelted by faeces and weight-related insults—towards the Gemonian Stairs. This was never a good place to be dragged as they were a common place of execution. And it was here, after a final plea to his people that he was executed.
As a final insult, a hook was put through his lifeless body and he was thrown into the Tiber.
Domitian
Demystifying Domitian is no easy feat. Our sources portray him as the black sheep of the family, the disappointing third installment of the Flavian franchise, succeeding his father Vespasian (69-79 CE) and his older brother Titus (79-81 CE).
Domitian ruled for 18 years, the longest reign of any emperor since Tiberius. But he shared the same fate as Nero in that, being the last ruler of a dynasty, he was always going to be reviled under the propaganda of the next. He was certainly ruthless. But while senators hated him, his soldiers loved him, and on balance his policies and reforms went a long way in laying the foundations for the next century of peace.
A great deal of mystery surrounds Domitian’s love life. Unusually for a Roman emperor, he only married once. He rebelled against Vespasian’s attempts to wed him to his brother’s daughter, Julia Flavia. Instead, he betrothed himself to the woman he loved, Domitia Longina, after the small matter of making her divorce her husband.
They appear to have had a happy marriage, save one significant hiccup in 83 CE. For reasons unknown, Domitia was banished from the palace and sent into exile—perhaps because of her failure to produce an heir, perhaps because Domitian was indulging a vice typical to the sex lives of the Caesars and having an affair – this time with Julia Flavia.
But Domitia returned within a year, and other than this there doesn’t look to have been anything particularly noteworthy.
That is until you read Suetonius.
Right from the outset, the biographer writes about how Domitian would continually harass the wives of men of high reputation, following an autocratic precedent set by Augustus, Caligula and Nero and fundamental to the sex lives of the Caesars.
He had a penchant for removing the hair from his lovers’ bodies with his own hands, Suetonius tells us, and loved nothing more than swimming in the baths with common prostitutes. He was adulterous with his niece, Julia Flavia, and in forcing her to abort their child, he ended up killing her.
A lot of this seems unlikely: reading more like political propaganda than a character portrait. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s rampant, racy, and a bloody good read.
The best and most quintessentially Roman anecdote of all is that Domitian referred to sexual intercourse as “bedroom wrestling”. We will never know if this – like many other anecdotes about the sex lives of the Caesars – was apocryphal or not, though my guess is that it probably is.
But the truth behind it is less important than the fact that it perfectly encapsulates the machismo of Roman sexuality, and adds a whole new layer of meaning to Seneca’s famous dictum vivere militare est—to live is to fight.
Elagabalus
“The life of Elagabalus, I should never have put into writing – hoping that nobody should know that he was emperor of Rome.”
The Augustan History, the Life of Elagabalus
So starts Aelius Lampridius, Elagabalus’ imperial biographer, and his scathing review only goes south from there. As emperor, Elagabalus defiled a Vestal Virgin, transformed the Roman Forum into an open-air brothel, and mandated the public worship of a conical black stone.
He trashed the traditions of conservative Roman politics by introducing a flamboyant Greek-style monarchy. He promoted slaves and eunuchs at the expense of senators and aristocrats. He even held drinking bouts that would put modern booze cruises in Ibiza to shame.
Going by our sources, Elagabalus’ three-year reign was an absolute nightmare for the elite, and (presumably) highly entertaining for the common citizen. He was, by ancient standards, one of Rome’s worst-ever emperors; at least that’s what ancient authors tell us.
But the truth, as always, is a little more complex.
➡️ Read my full article about Elagabalus
Elagabalus’ sex life make Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties look like mere child’s play. It was said that the young emperor never bedded the same woman twice. His limitless libido extended to male charioteers, whose speed and physical prowess he particularly admired. To put this into context, a Roman emperor sleeping with a charioteer would have been about as scandalous as King Charles of England bedding Cristiano Ronaldo and establishing him as concubine in Buckingham Palace.
Elagabalus’ biographer tells us that the emperor procured men for political office based solely on the size of their dicks. He made use of more than just their counsel, availing himself of more anal sex than you’d believe a teenager could fit into just one mortal anus and three years on the throne.
The historian Cassius Dio also tells us that Elagabalus offered doctors vast sums of money to create him a vagina by means of incision, leading many to dub him Rome’s “transgender emperor”. True, this could just have been slander meant to tarnish Elagabalus’ reputation, but it could also reflect a reality regarding his liminal approach to gender. Ultimately, we cannot know.
Indeed, we cannot know much at all about Elagabalus, whose reign ended ingloriously when he was slaughtered by his soldiers while hiding in the toilet. Like many emperors who were the last of their bloodline, Elagabalus was subjected to damnatio memoriae, the damnation of memory — a practice whereby dead, disgraced Roman emperors had their statues pulled down or recarved, coins defaced, and inscriptions erased. Any accounts that portrayed Elagabalus in a positive light were likely lost during the frenzied censorship that followed his fall from power.
