There isn’t a lot of meat on this question, unfortunately. It’s rather simple.
What evidence is there of STDs in the ancient world?
I realize that the ancients’ understanding of disease wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have taken a great philosopher to realize that the sex he had the night before might have had something to do with the red dots on his genitalia.
Had people built up immunities to local STDs (indeed, even diseases in general), suggesting that STDs only became major problems as cultures interacted more over time?
Syphilis, for one, leaves behind evidence on the bones, so they’ve been able to trace it in the archeological record. There’s some controversy about whether it originated in the New World or the Old, or if it mutated around the fifteenth century, or what, but it can be traced fairly reliably.
The index to Disease in the Ancient Greek World has an entry for Herpes zoster in Hippocrates in the index. E. M. Tansey notes that gonorrhoea was described in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman sources.
According to R S Morton of the Department of the History of Medicine, University, Sheffield, UK, “The concept of social or sexual contact as a factor in sickness was embryonic in pre-Hippocratic times. Vague analogies were drawn regarding the role of seeds in botany.36 Hippocrates carried the idea forward in his books On the Nature of Man and On Epidemics. He noted that just as Greece had imported sexual mores and practices from Asia and Egypt, so also had it imported associated diseases.” Morton speculates that what was described as moist ulcers may have been genital herpes. Genital warts , candida, and scabies may have also been observed. There’s a pdf of his 1991 article at the link if you’re interested.
Although animals do have their distinct sexually transmitted diseases, they tend to be fairly species-specific.
The bacteria that cause syphilis and gonorrhea (Treponema palladium and Neisseria gonorrhoeae) have no common counterpart in most known animal species. Not even diseases associated with other bacteria in their genus are common. There are reports of infections (non-sexually transmitted) caused by some Neisseria organisms, but they go usually in the “uncommon diseases” list. I’m not a microbiologist, though, and I have no idea if there are other very closely related bacteria that cause disease in animals. And even if there are, it is unlikely they are common causes of sexually transmitted disease.
There is another Neisseria organism that cause disease in humans, though. Neisseria meningitidis causes meningococcal encephalitis.
The only species I could think having diseases similar to gonorrhea or syphilis are primates. A pubmed search outside of work came up with a journal abstract with the first sentence reading:
I couldn’t find something similar for syphilis, but I couldn’t find any journal articles that talked about the disease occuring naturally in primates. I did find a couple mentioning experimental infection with syphilis.
Thanks for all the responses! This stuff makes for fascinating reading.
I’ve heard from a few sources (my old middle school history teachers, mostly) that ancient peoples (Greeks and later Romans, especially) were basically able to have lots of unprotected sex without fear of disease and it was when they interacted with other cultures that had diseases that they hadn’t built a natural immunity to that all of that changed (and vice versa with other cultures who would interact with the Greeks and Romans).