Off Topic And Now for Something Completely Different

Let me tell you boys women in their 50’s are ****jng animals

 

That could be the only thing you and I ever agree on...

 

That was one of several that aren’t true

 

What a fascinating read!!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/populus-how-to-have-sex-like-a-roman/

 

Maybe if you pay to read it?

 

there you go


How to have sex like a Roman: an ancient guide to the art of love
From imperial orgies to contraceptive spiders, the Romans’ intimate appetites were insatiable

Guy de la Bédoyère17 March 2024 • 10:00am

please log in to view this image

‘To the Spirits of the Departed, Tiberius Claudius Secundus,” reads an ancient tombstone found in Rome and dedicated to the 52-year-old deceased by his widow. “Baths, wine and sex destroy our bodies. But only baths, wine and sex make life worth living.”

In our own troubled times, there is something reassuring about discovering how much of the human experience is common to other ages. While there was plenty about the Romans that on the face of it seems alien or even horrible from a modern perspective, especially the extreme brutality of their wars and mass entertainment, in so many other ways they were just like us. They had ambitions, families, beliefs, hopes, fears, frustrations, joy – and more than a passing interest in sex.

In his Natural History (AD 77-79), Pliny explored every topic possible, but sex in particular piqued his curiosity. He noted how the Greek philosopher Democritus had criticised those who used sexual intercourse merely as a means of procreation. “By Hercules,” Pliny said, “the less one treats it like that, the better,” and went on to point out how it “cures pain in the loins, dullness of vision, unsoundness of mind and melancholy”.

Roman historians recounted in lascivious detail the dissolute behaviour of the emperors: stories about the orgies of Nero (who reigned from AD 54 until his death in AD 68) or the bizarre sexual practices of Elagabalus (AD 218-222) have been a source of fascination since antiquity. Although it is harder to get a handle on the tastes and interests of ordinary people, the colourful depictions of sexual activity discovered in Pompeii give us a clue as to how they might have felt.

One set of public baths, by the city’s Marine Gate (Porta Marina), used images of sexual positions to identify individual clothes lockers; the designs were probably a joke, rather than an indication that the place was packed with copulating couples night and day. Elsewhere in Pompeii, trinkets decorated with erotic images were everywhere: the most popular was the erect phallus – often placed above doorways to ward off evil spirits.

Pointing the way: 1st-century phallic stone relief found in PompeiiCREDIT: Patrice Cartier
In ancient Rome, the distinctions we make today about sex between people of the same or different genders did not exist. It was taken for granted that a wealthy older man would have favourite boys as sexual partners. Slaves of either gender were often forced into having sex with their owners. It was thus commonplace for a man to be in a long and fruitful marriage with a woman, have casual sex with young female slaves or prostitutes and also to have male partners. Sometimes, a male owner’s interest in a female slave evolved naturally into a happy marriage; indeed, he may have purchased her and freed her for that purpose.

Yet, while the Romans engaged enthusiastically in sex and lacked many of the inhibitions more commonplace in recent centuries, they also struggled to keep traditional moral standards in place when confronted with reckless abandon and indulgence. So, when it came to sex in ancient Rome what, exactly, were the rules of the game? Here is what we know.

Advertisement
Adultery
A father who discovered that his married daughter had committed adultery was legally entitled to kill both the man and the daughter. As for the cuckolded husband, he was supposed to divorce his wife on the spot and was permitted to kill her seducer if the culprit fell into one of several categories – actors, gladiators, criminals, freedmen and slaves among them. There was an incentive for such drastic action: failure to punish the seducer could lead to the husband being prosecuted for running his wife as a prostitute.

Cato the Elder, who served as censor in 184 BC, went further, saying that if a woman had been adulterous, then her husband was entitled to kill her – and, indeed, Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) only narrowly managed to avoid ordering the killing of members of his family under the laws he himself had passed. His wayward daughter Julia presented him with an almost impossible challenge when her licentious behaviour was exposed in 2 BC.

House of Caecilius Iucundus, Pompeii (1st century BC) CREDIT: Andrea Jemolo
She was said to have engaged in every possible form of vice, including drunken parties in the Forum, and was alleged to have been habitually unfaithful during her marriage to his friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Her behaviour was humiliating to the emperor, especially as it appeared everyone else had known except him. Yet, since Julia was his only child, he was unable to bring himself to punish her with death and instead had her exiled, but after five years she was permitted to return to Italy and live out her days in Rhegium (Reggio Calabria).

Years later, the emperor Domitian (AD 81-96) came close to executing his wife, Domitia, for adultery. Persuaded to exercise restraint, he instead murdered her lover, an actor called Paris, along with his pupil, who had the misfortune of looking like Paris. Some of those punished for adultery in Domitian’s reign had been his partners. One woman was executed after being found guilty simply of taking her clothes off in front of a statue of the emperor.

Advertisement
Contraception
If an unmarried woman became pregnant as a result of an adulterous liaison it could give the game away, yet, for a sexually active Roman woman, preventing conception was not easy. One obvious means was coitus interruptus. Another recommended technique involved attempting to prevent the entry of sperm by applying a compound of white lead mixed with olive oil, and honey, cedar or balsam sap to the vagina. A third, even more eccentric procedure was to use a strip of deer hide to tie onto a woman a couple of worms found inside a “hairy spider” with a notoriously large head.

Augustus’s daughter Julia took a different tack: she was said to have snapped at anyone who commented on her promiscuous conduct with the tart response, “I carry a passenger only when the ship is full.” In other words, she took the simple precaution of only having affairs when she was already pregnant.

Advertisement
Seduction
Ovid avidly enjoyed the pursuit of married women into adulterous affairs, prostitutes, and casual liaisons. One route the poet recommended was to ingratiate oneself with a woman’s maid to acquire all sorts of insider information on her mistress’s timing and habits. He famously cited the circus as a perfect meeting place, where one could enjoy the titillating possibilities the tight-packed seating afforded. Ovid had all sorts of hints about how to seduce a woman, starting with finding out which horses were running, which was her favourite and then cheering the same one on. From there, it was a short hop to brushing off dirt that had chanced to fall on her breasts, or simply pretending that it had. Ovid even explained how such gestures were an easy way of winning over the simple minds of women.

Mars and Venus, Pompeii CREDIT: Brian Parker / Alamy Stock Photo
His recommendations on how to pursue an affair involved hints to a woman on posing as a loyal wife at dinner while at the same time making signs and gestures to her lover. Of course, part of his purpose was to create vaguely erotic literature, but he also illustrated the enduringly complex ambivalence about women in Roman society. Today, Ovid’s methods would be seen as abusive behaviour, but even at the time his antics were a dangerous way in which to carry on. He was exiled by Augustus for his blatant flouting of traditional morality, although his conduct was probably far from unusual.

Prostitution
Perhaps unsurprisingly, prostitutes catered to all levels of Roman society. Records dating to the 4th century AD list more than 40 brothels in Rome. Among other places, prostitutes could be found in the Forum and, according to Catullus, outside Pompey’s theatre, where a woman once bared her breasts at him while he was looking for a friend. The later poet Martial noted that there were also the bustuarias moechas, best translated as “prostitutes of where the funeral pyres are”; in other words, women who touted for business among the tombs.

In the year AD 19, during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37), a scandal broke about how Roman women of status were working as prostitutes in order to evade the legal sanctions imposed on “normal” women for sexual misconduct. The traditional view, at least in Roman lore, was that a prostitute was sufficiently punished merely by admitting to her vices, even though prostitution was a routine part of Roman city life. This time, after a woman called Vistilia had advertised her availability, the senate introduced measures to make sure “the lust of females was curbed”. Women whose fathers or husbands belonged to the equestrian class were prohibited from profiting by selling their bodies and Vistilia was banished to the Aegean island of Seriphos. Tiberius also tried to prohibit anyone attending a brothel with a coin or a ring bearing Augustus’s name.

Latin lovers: detail from The Romans of Decadence (1847), Thomas Couture
Some practitioners claimed a higher standard of service and respectability. There was a prostitute in the imperial period called Vibia Calybenis, a lena or “madam”, defensively commemorated on a family tombstone for earning her living “without cheating others”. One word for a prostitute, meretrix, meant “female wage earner”. Another probable prostitute, Allia Potestas, was memorialised on an epitaph also of indeterminate imperial date. It recorded her respectable virtues as a matron before moving on to some ambiguous compliments that appear to emphasise her cleanliness and suggest how much more she cost than other prostitutes in the Forum.

At Isernia, in central Italy, one 2nd-century innkeeper and his wife set up a monument to their business, which they operated under what were evidently trade names: he was called Lucius Calidius Eroticus and she was Fannia Voluptuas. The pseudonyms do not need translating. The stone’s text continued with a vignette of a discussion with a customer about his bill, which included the cost of bread, wine, relish, hay for a mule, and a girl. The girl had cost eight asses, which at the time was equivalent to a little under half a day’s pay for a legionary.

At Pompeii, hints on where to pick up prostitutes were everywhere. More references to prostitution have been found in Pompeiian graffiti than any other profession by a considerable margin. One was inscribed at the rear entrance of the House of the Menander, one of the town’s most extravagant homes. In this case, the advertisement was for Novellia Primigenia, a prostitute who worked in a nearby town called Nuceria, “in the prostitutes’ quarter”; her name, Novellia, means “fresh” or “new”.

Satyr and Maenad, detail from a wall painting in Pompeii CREDIT: Bridgeman
Those who had availed themselves of the services on offer in Pompeii were inclined to record their experiences on brothel walls, thus “Facilis f---ed here”, and “Scordopordonicus f---ed well whomsoever he wanted”. There can be no doubt that the dozens of brothels in Rome were embellished with similar comments. At the Ostian private baths of Trinacria was a mosaic inscription that read “statio cunnulingiorun”, a misspelling of “statio cunnilingiorum”, “the place of the cunnilinguists”.

Martial was familiar with such establishments. He described visits to labelled cubicles, enticed in by a “boy or a girl”, protected only by a curtain and a bolt to secure it. He dismissed the need for anyone who “either sodomises or f---s” to be so modest as to insist on any gaps being blocked up with plaster.

 

Cheers Chelsea

 

Some of you have got too much time on your hands he says after reading all of it..

 

Some of us are that old on here we could be reading our own history.

 

The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.

 

Made me laugh...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/ukne...S&cvid=6c329a982f944b8f8db1fbe6e467fdea&ei=12

 

That was what Sylvester Stallone said when that happened to him when he was married to Brigitte Neilsen and the police asked him why he hadn’t reported it until weeks later.

 

Gorgeous.