“toga party!”
In the original “Walking Tall” movie, when the new sheriff discovers the judge is undercutting him by warning about search warrants - he moves the judge’s office to the men’s room - which is a row of toilets without stalls. (The sheriff has the right to allocate office space in the county building.)
Also, a journalist in the 1970’s reported on his visit to Moscow. His wife needed to use a public restroom and found it was a row of toilets without stalls. She says all the women in there stopped and stared at her while she did her business because they wanted to see what western underwear looked like.
“Why didn’t you just leave?” he asked.
"What, " she replied, “and miss the chance to see what Russian underwear looks like?”
So even in modern times (the 1940’s and 1950’s?), a row of unstalled toilets was not unusual.
OTOH, even with the Roman public baths, thre seem to be His and Hers areas and you don’t hear about debauchery in there. I suppose there was some moral standard, and most of our images of misbehaviour come from stories about private parties of the hedonistic elite who ignored those standards in private.
No, Blood and Sand gets much, much, much better as it goes along. The episodes leading up to the season finale will give you chills. The season finale will leave you crying in the corner sucking your thumb.
There was also the scene in Rome where Vorenus and Mrs. Vorenus make love on their newly acquired farmland as a religious act to ensure the land’s fertility. IN FRONT OF THEIR CHILDREN! Oh dear! No wonder Rome fell.
That would work. One of them would surely finger Spartacus.
I know you’re being tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a myth that the fall of Rome had anything to do with sex.
I get the impression that the show kind of extrapolates from the most lurid and scandalous exposes of aristocratic (and imperial) Roman sexual escapades. Kind of like assuming everyone who was around during the sixties was pleasuring groupies with sharks, and having LSD crazed orgies at muddy rock concerts.
I’m only 25 and the while toilets in the boys’ lockerroom at my high school did have stalls there were no doors on them (apparently there were in the girls’). I’ve also seen doorless stalls at places like rest stops and even the odd campground.
Right, that’s my point. He’s using the Germans as an example of what is right, compared with these urbanized, immoral Romans. Really, it’s so blatant that Germany is almost more useful in learning about Rome than about Germany.
Yep. I can just picture Tacitus writing that, then going off and shaking his cane at those damn kids on his lawn.
Marcus Portius Cato the Censor was widely seen to be the epitome of these old Roman virtues. Dressing soberly, living austerely, disdaining ostentation, abstaining from sex unless necessary for procreation.
I don’t think they actually had sex. He was just meant to lie on top of her symbolically. Then Niobe said something like, “You’re not pretending” to indicate that he had a boner, but I don’t think they actually had sex even after that.
*…a guy getting s… by a slavegirl while talking to his wife, who is getting fingered…
*
The antecedent is not clear. As written, the guy or the slavegirl could be doing the talking. (Who is doing the fingering is yet another question).
Clarity! What would Seneca say?
This example of imitative magic has been used by several cultures, to encourage the crops to reproduce.
Men having sex with female slaves: no problem.
Women having sex with men they’re not married to: problem, but it happened of course.
Men having sex with men: acceptable but with lots of ground rules.
1- No penetration between equals
2- No getting penetrated ever if you’re a free Roman
3- Do anything you want with a male slave, except seen number 2
Orgies could be parts of religious rites but that didn’t mean they were socially acceptable- ma and pa didn’t just go get their freak on and claim it was Wednesday night worship service.
Augustus- two generations after Spartacus- passed a lot of reforms because women having sex outside of marriage was evidently getting out of control. Unfortunately, if accounts are to be believed, his daughter was the worst offender, so he made her an example and exiled her to a small island.
Generally the Roman matron was to be demure, cultured, and 100% devoted to her husband in all matters in and outside of the bedroom. The man was expected to fool around or at least accepted if he did, but he was expected to keep free of disease and not produce a bunch of bastards, and above all- don’t be penetrated.
Slaves were considered human in the aspect that you could talk to them or expect them to communicate or legally have sex with them, but they were about like dogs or other household animals in that you didn’t mind having sex in front of them, eating in front of them without giving them anything, carrying on arguments around them, etc… Slaves rarely ran away because the penalties were so severe and besides which many of them had “Property of Biggus Dikkus” (or whatever) on a metal plate that was chained to their neck if they were lucky, branded on them if they weren’t. It wasn’t like the antebellum south where slaves were so valuable that they were severely punished but rarely killed for running away- a runaway slave of no special skills was cheap enough to just kill them to make an example to others.
Women having sex with male slaves: the shock, the horror!
The modern idea of Rome as a hotbed of hedonism is really the product (in my opinion) of the way ancient writers dealt with issues of power in the Empire. As was mentioned above, sexual slurs were the stock-in-trade of Republican rhetoric, and the idea of an emperor breaking sexual taboos goes hand in hand with the idea of an emperor being above societal rules as a whole. There’s some really interesting work being done on both the quasi-encoded meaning of sexual slurs in rhetoric and also how some emperors may have used these quasi-encoded forms of behaviour to express themselves.
In terms of actual reality (as much as we can say anything about ancient ‘actual reality’), there’s not much evidence for that sort of thing. Slaves and prostitutes were fair game (again, as mentioned above) but there’s nothing in any extant literature that I’m aware of that’s anything like what you’re describing. I mean, Catullus is dirty and all, but he talks about his friends who have prostitute girlfriends, and his (male) friends who have secret liasons with other men during lunch hours, and his married female lover (who he calls a big slut once she dumps him), etc. but really, that’s not much different from what’s normal nowadays.
The Republic and Empire lasted for centuries; there was almost 400 years between the time of Spartacus and the building of Constantinople. Morals and attitudes changed frequently during that time as they have pretty much every other place over very long periods of time.