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His return to Bithynia just a few days after leaving to “collect a debt” only fanned the flames.
ROMAN RULERS SERIES
As a young man, he spent a considerable amount of time at the court of King Nicomedes of Bithynia, fuelling a series of rumors about an affair in which Caesar was the submissive party. Known as the “ bald adulterer” Julius Caesar fit the Roman political stereotype perfectly by sleeping his way to power. Salon Julius CaesarĪdmittedly Julius Caesar is better known to history as the penetrated rather than the penetrator.
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But by adding historical context and comparing his anecdotes with those of other writers, we can at least get a feeling for the sexual attitudes of the authors if not for the sexual acts of their subjects. A lot of what he wrote might be fanciful and fictitious.
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Since many of the early Roman emperors were phenomenally unpopular with the Roman elite, and it was the elite who wrote the histories, this is why the emperors have come down to us as templates for erotic degeneracy and sadistic cruelty (in the literature the two are often indistinguishable).īut how much of what we think we know is true? In this article, we’ll be looking at anecdotes from “ The Lives of the Twelve Caesars” by the first century AD court biographer Suetonius-who, if you’ve never read him, is essentially the ancients’ answer to a Daily Mail columnist. Macho and militaristic, elite Roman culture revolved as much around a man’s ability to demonstrate his sexual power as it did around scoring political points against rivals by accusing them of effeminacy or depraved sex lives. If you only need to know one thing about Roman attitudes towards sex, it’s that they’ve given us our word “vagina” which, in Latin, translates as the sheath of one’s sword.