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Roman cameo portrayal of man and youth

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Roman attitudes and acceptance of homosexuality varied over time, such attitudes ranging from strong condemnation to quite open acceptance.

In the early Roman Republic, pederasty was considered a degenerate Greek practice and as such was generally forbidden or not-done.

As Greek attitudes gradually became accepted in Rome during the late Republic and early Empire, however, a new form of same-sex relations emerged that was quite different from homosexuality in ancient Greece, but owed much to it. As men, particularly the pater familias, wielded complete authority in Roman society, the Roman experience of same-sex relations is often characterized by master/slave-style interactions. Indeed, in 226 BC the Lex Scatinia effectively banned relations (consensual or not), male prostitution, and sexual passivity involving free born boys and girls. ^[1] Slaves still were considered legitimate sexual partners, often if not always regardless of their wishes. In short, an adult Roman citizen male could acceptably penetrate (whether a male or a female) but not be penetrated - catamite was commonly used as a slander.

Though perhaps not the originator of the practice, the emperor Nero appears to have been the first Roman emperor to marry a male. According to Edward Gibbon, writing in 1776, of the first twelve emperors only Claudius was exclusively involved with women. All others took either boys or men as lovers.^[2] This drew criticism from other Romans, such as Suetonius.

Pederasty largely lost its status as a ritual part of education — a process already begun by the increasingly sophisticated and cosmopolitan Greeks — and was instead seen as an activity primarily driven by one's sexual desires and competing with desire for women. The social acceptance of pederastic relations waxed and waned during the centuries. Conservative thinkers condemned it — along with other forms of indulgence. Tacitus attacks the Greek customs of "gymnasia et otia et turpes amores" (palaestrae, idleness, and shameful loves). ^[3]

Other writers spent no effort censuring pederasty per se, but praised or blamed its various aspects. Martial appears to have favored it, going as far as to essentialize not the sexual use of the catamite but his nature as a boy: upon being discovered by his wife "inside a boy" and offered the "same thing" by her, he retorts with a list of mythological personages who, despite being married, took young male lovers, and concludes by rejecting her offer since "a woman merely has two vaginas." ^[4] Among the Romans, pederasty reached its last zenith during the time of hellenophile emperor Hadrian. A man whose passion for boys paralleled that of his predecessor, Trajan, he fell in love with Antinous, a young teenage Greek, and had his eromenos deified upon the latter's premature death.

The Myth of Homosexuality and the Fall of the Roman Empire