Sex is a primary instinct, but its experience has varied throughout history. Beyond the physiological, cultural factors instilled by learning social norms determine the plurality of sexual behaviors. Today it may seem surprising to us that prostitution was considered a gift from the gods and that the money obtained had the character of a sacred offering.
This is what the Greek historian Herodotus states when referring to the most shameful custom of the Babylonians: “Every female daughter of the country must sit in the temple of Aphrodite and give herself once a year to a foreign man. She must follow the first to deposit the money to fulfill the sacred duty towards the goddess Milita, the name that the Assyrians give to Aphrodite. For his part, Strabo stated that, in opulent Corinth, “the sanctuary of Aphrodite was so rich that as sacred slaves it had more than a thousand heteras that both men and women had offered to the goddess.”
It is most likely that the stories of Herodotus and Strabo were a construct of Greek culture, which rejected prostitution in temples, as Roman and Christian culture would later do, to demonize Eastern rites.
In classical Greece and Rome, militarized and slave societies, women were subjected and protected by men, since they were considered without the intellectual capacity to make important decisions for themselves. Even in Sparta, where the gender gap was supposedly smaller, women's most important role was to bear and raise strong children for war. Hence, they were educated under the notion of physical strength, could drink wine and participate in gymnastic and sports activities like men.
In both Greece and Rome, religion and social rules allowed the male citizen any type of pleasure. To the woman, none. The concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality or transsexuality were meaningless, since no sexual practice was frowned upon, as long as it was carried out by a man.
In Greece, Eros fundamentally governed love between men, and Aphrodite (the Roman Venus) ruled love between men and women. Drawings of male and female sexual organs, and the interaction between the two without distinction of gender, are common in everyday utensils. Religious festivals in honor of Dionysus were accompanied by phallic processions, and women made cakes in the shape of genitals to offer to the god.
The fullness of the loving bond only occurred between male couples. Sexuality between man and woman was imperfect, as it derived from androgynes who had two genitals, four legs, four hands, two equal faces and a single head, until Zeus punished them, cutting them in two.
Greek citizens used to have sexual and emotional relationships with adolescents in a rite of passage from adolescence to manhood. Plato maintains that considering love with ephebes as inappropriate was something for barbarians or tyrants. The same man could have in his youth a lover older than him, have later, as an adult, been the sexual initiator of a teenager, married, had concubines whose children could be recognized and sought pleasure with slaves or mercenaries of love.
Among the latter, the hetairas stood out, luxury courtesans who enlivened the symposiums of wealthy men with their dances and songs. The verses of the poet Pindar describe the fabulous banquet with fifty hetairas that Xenophon of Corinth offered to celebrate his victory in the Olympic Games.
Confined to the gynoecium, the Greek woman lacked the right to suffrage, to own property or to inherit. Her place was in the house and her function was to raise children. A law of Dracon, in the 7th century BC. C., allowed homicide when adulterers were caught red-handed in order to preserve the institution of marriage. Adulterous single women could be sold into slavery. Oral sex was also a shameful practice for men: it dirty the mouth and the honor of the citizen who went to the agora to talk about business or politics.
As in Hellas, in Rome female sexuality was repressed, while men could have relationships with members of the same or opposite sex, but they must always be the dominant party. Being copulated by another man implied being submissive, something unacceptable for the masculine ideal.
Julius Caesar's career was almost ruined when he was accused of having been the passive lover during his youth of King Nicomedes of Bitina, a Roman province located in modern-day Turkey. Hence they called him “rival of the queen, brothel of Nicomedes and prostitute of Bithynia.” The historian Suetonius, in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, concludes that “he who loved numerous queens and above all, Cleopatra, earned a shameful reputation as a sodomite and adulterer.” Curio called him “husband of all wives and wife of all husbands.”
Prostitution was legal, and prostitutes, despite their miserable living conditions, were required to pay taxes to the treasury. Everyone who could pay had the right to sex, as long as they abstained from married women, widows, virgins, or free-born adolescents.
Horace, in the Satires, alluded to the danger faced by those who preferred affairs with married women to prostitutes, since the husband of the adulterous wife could condemn them to death: “Does not the husband of the adulterous wife have a just power? about both? Will you go to the gallows, you so judicious? Stop persecuting midwives, from where there are more calamities and harms than fruits to be obtained. And neither is a thigh more delicate nor a leg more slender because it is among pearls and emeralds, and often, those of a prostitute are even more beautiful.
Both sexes used slaves as instruments of pleasure. The poet Juvenal complained that slave owners castrated them to avoid the risk of pregnancy and always problematic offspring. Emperor Constantine passed a law that condemned matrons who copulated with slaves to capital punishment.
Titus Livy narrates that King Tarquin the Proud was able to rape Lucretia, without her resisting, threatening to kill her along with a naked slave, in her own bed. As the law would have considered her guilty for having relations with a slave, Lucrecia committed suicide so as not to stain the honor of her family.
The repression against female sexuality reached its peak when, in the year 186 BC. C., some seven thousand women were accused of participating in orgies and murdered by their male relatives, to whom the State transferred the execution of the accused to restore the honor of their families.
Sexual violence was common, even in the protected area of free women. The mistreatment of wives was not illegal and Saint Augustine justified it with the argument that they did not fulfill their conjugal duties. Violence against women in Roman society remained hidden in Western legislation and customs until recently.
In Spain, still in the 1960s, the husband could kill the adulterous wife without any penalty other than exile. And until the eighties of the last century, in many European countries rape was not punished if the rapist married the attacked woman.
Spanning centuries and millennia, Judeo-Christian morality, still present in Western culture, rejected carnal delight and judged any act not aimed at procreation as sinful. In Christian Europe, between the 14th and 17th centuries, the Church considered prostitution a lesser evil, as it was the least serious of the sins of lust, and the public powers acted as pimps, confining prostitutes in ghettos so that men could obtain a pleasure that was forbidden to them in virtuous and reproductive copulation with their own woman.
The Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis (1330-1409), one of the most widely read Catalan writers, wrote: “The ardent lover and dishonest man with his wife sins more with her than with another public female, and is an adulterer because of his work.”
Sodomy, a term today used exclusively as a synonym for anal intercourse, was related to the medieval heresies of the Cathars or Bulgarians, which denied the sacrament of marriage, and included masturbation, oral sex and even the sexual position in which “ the wife was placed at the top and the husband at the bottom,” according to the Dominican theologian Bartolomé de Medina (1591).
On the other hand, in Greece or Rome, intercourse a tergo (later carnal access) was widely spread. The erotic scenes, present in mosaics, ceramics and common objects confirm this, while at the same time testifying that sex was not only sex, but a gift from the gods.
