ROMAN HISTORY
BY LIVY
Titus Livius (59 BC – AD 17) was the author of by far the most substantial history of early Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), which he began writing around 33 BC and publishing in 27 BC. Though, however, his history covered the whole history of Rome down to 9 BC, much of it is lost and only very briefly summarised in Epitomes.
Presented here is everything of Greek love interest to be found in either any of the Books or their Epitomes.
The translation of Books XXVI and XXIX is by Revd. Canon Roberts in Livy, History of Rome, published by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1912. That of Books XXXIX-XL is by Evan T. Sage in the Loeb Classical Library volumes 313 and 332 published by the Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1936-8.
VIII 28 i-viii
See the article Livy on the outrage by Papirius in 326/5 BC for this episode.
XXI 2 iii-iv and 3 ii-iv
See the article Pederasty Among the Ancient Carthaginians for this episode set in 229/8 BC.
In the speech of Vibius Virrius to the senate of the city of Capua in the summer of 211 BC, announcing his intention of killing himself with poison if it insisted on surrendering to the besieging Roman army:
| I will not see my city plundered and burnt, and the matrons and maidens[1] and freeborn[2] boys of Capua ravished and outraged.[3] | nec dirui incendique patriam videbo, nec rapi ad stuprum matres Campanas virginesque et ingenuos pueros. |
The relevance of the following passage will become apparent from the one after. This one concerns what happened in 204 BC, when a detachment of Roman soldiers was left in charge of the Greek city of Locri in Sicily, which had earlier defected to the Carthaginian side in the Second Punic War, but had just been recaptured by the Romans with help from inside the city from the Locrian population.
| Nothing that can make the power of the strong hateful to the weak and defenceless was left undone by the general and his men in their conduct towards the townsmen. Unspeakable outrages were inflicted on their persons, their wives and their children. | nihil omnium quae inopi invisas opes potentioris faciunt praetermissum in oppidanos est ab duce aut a militibus; in corpora ipsorum, in liberos, in coniuges infandae contumeliae editae. |
XXIX 17 xv-xvi
In a speech to the Roman Senate made by the eldest of the Locrian delegates sent to Rome in 204 BC to complain about the aforesaid atrocities still being committed by Roman soldiers in Locri:
| They all alike rob, plunder, beat, wound, kill, outrage matrons, maidens and freeborn boys[4] torn from their parents’ arms. Each day witnesses a fresh storm, a fresh sack of our city; everywhere, day and night, it is echoing with the shrieks of women and boys[5] who are being seized and carried off.[6] | [xv] omnes rapiunt, spoliant, verberant, volnerant, occidunt; constuprant matronas, virgines, ingenuos raptos ex complexu parentium. [xvi] cottidie capitur urbs nostra, cottidie diripitur; dies noctesque omnia passim mulierum puerorumque qui rapiuntur atque asportantur ploratibus sonant. |
In 186 BC, a scandal broke out in Rome regarding the antics of a large secret cult celebrating the festival of Bacchus, the god of wine. It began to get out due to a freedwoman courtesan Hispala Faecenia warning her lover, an adolescent of good birth, against his plan to be initiated into it on the following grounds:
| She knew, she said, that it was the factory of all sorts of corruptions; and it was known that for two years now no one had been initiated who had passed the age of twenty years. As each was introduced, he became a sort of victim for the priests. They, she continued, would lead him to a place which would ring with howls and the song of a choir and the beating of cymbals and drums, that the voice of the sufferer, when his virtue was violently attacked, might not be heard. | [vi] scire corruptelarum omnis generis eam officinam esse; et iam biennio constare neminem initiatum ibi maiorem annis viginti. [vii] ut quisque introductus sit, velut victimam tradi sacerdotibus. eos deducere in locum qui circumsonet ululatibus cantuque symphoniae et cymbalorum et tympanorum pulsu, ne vox quiritantis, cum per vim stuprum inferatur, exaudiri possit. |
XXXIX 13 xiv
The scandal of the Bacchanalian cult having been divulged to one of the consuls, he questioned Hispala, who told him that its nocturnal initiation rites included male homosexual stupra (outrages) and that …
| Their number, she said, was very great, almost constituting a second state; among them were certain men and women of high rank. Within the last two years it had been ordained that no one beyond the age of twenty years should be initiated: boys of such age were sought for as admitted both vice and corruption.[7] | multitudinem ingentem, alterum iam prope populum esse; in his nobiles quosdam viros feminasque. biennio proximo institutum esse ne quis maior viginti annis initiaretur: captari aetates et erroris et stupri patientes. |
The consuls having taken action against the cult, one of them addressed “a meeting of the people” to explain the severity of their actions by telling them what the cult had been up to, including this:
|
“Of what sort do you think are, first, gatherings held by night, second, meetings of men and women in common? If you knew at what ages males were initiated, you would feel not only pity for them but also shame. Do you think, citizens, that youths initiated by this oath should be made soldiers? That arms should be entrusted to men mustered from this foul shrine? Will men debased by their own debauchery and that of others fight to the death on behalf of the chastity of your wives and children? “Yet it would be less serious if their wrongdoing had merely made them effeminate —that was in great measure their personal dishonour —and if they had kept their hands from crime and their thoughts from evil designs: never has there been so much evil in the state nor affecting so many people in so many ways. |
“[15 xii] quales primum nocturnos coetus, deinde promiscuos mulierum ac virorum esse creditis? [xiii] si quibus aetatibus initientur mares sciatis, non misereat vos eorum solum, sed etiam pudeat. hoc sacramento initiatos iuvenes milites faciendos censetis, Quirites? his ex obsceno sacrario eductis arma committenda? [xiv] hi cooperti stupris suis alienisque pro pudicitia coniugum ac liberorum vestrorum ferro decernent? [16 i] “Minus tamen esset si flagitiis tantum effeminati forent—ipsorum id magna ex parte dedecus erat—, a facinoribus manus mentem a fraudibus abstinuissent; nunquam tantum malum in re publica fuit, nec ad plures nec ad plura pertinens. |
XXXIX 42-43
See the article The Disgrace of L. Quinctius Flaminus, 184 BC for this episode.
Explaining how in 182/1 Theoxena, a Thessalian widowed many years before through the brutality of Philip V King of the Macedonians, came to decide it would be better to kill her and her sister’s young sons rather than let them fall into his hands:
| After she received the king’s proclamation about the arrest of the children of the men who had been put to death, thinking that they would be exposed not only to the mockery of the king but even to the lust of the guards, she turned her thoughts to a deed of horror, and dared to say that she would rather kill them all with her own hand than let them fall into the power of Philip. | [vi] postquam regis edictum de comprehendendis liberis eorum qui interfecti essent accepit, ludibrio futuros non regis modo sed custodum etiam libidini rata, ad rem atrocem animum adiecit, [vii] ausaque est dicere sua manu se potius omnes interfecturam quam in potestatem Philippi venirent. |
Following a failed attempt to escape into exile, Theoxena did indeed have the boys kill themselves and she drowned herself to pre-empt imminent capture by Philip’s men.
[1] It may be worth noting in passing, as an example of how recent translators flagrantly do not translate more accurately, but rather seek to blind their readers with a distorted view that imposes 21st century ways of thinking on the remote past, that the latest translator for the Loeb classics, one Yardley, chooses to mistranslate “matres {…] virginesque” as “mothers, girls”, as if the distinction drawn fitted the silly 21st century obsession with age rather than status.
[2] The translator’s “noble” has been replaced by “freeborn” as a more accurate translation of “ingenuos”, who included plebeians born free. In any case, the word is critical here for understanding Roman attitudes. What was outrageous about raping the women was that the ones concerned were either married or vigins. In contrast, what was outrageous about raing these boys was that they were freeborn; if they had been slaves, it would not have been.
[3] Note the expectation that rampaging Roman soldiers would be as interested in sex with boys as with women and girls. As it turned out, the Roman army was not let loose to pillage and rape after Capua surrendered, but see Sallust, The War with Catiline 51 ix for a speech by Julius Caesar in 63 BC which made the same assumption. See also the passage below on this webpage (Livy XXIX 17) and Tacitus’s description of the capture of Cremona on 24 October AD 69 in his Histories III 33 for examples of victorious Roman armies raping both women and boys.
[4] Roberts translates “ingenuos” as “boys” which misses the main point of the word that they were “freeborn boys”, here inserted instead. The point being made is not that boys only roused the interest of Roman soldiers if they were freeborn, but that it was only the rape of freeborn boys that was a stuprum (outrage) from the Roman (and presumably Locrian) point of view. Raping slave-boys was at worst, if they were not one’s own, akin to poaching.
[5] The translator inexcusably misses out translating “puerorumque” meaning “and boys”, here restored.
[6] See Tacitus’s description of the capture of Cremona on 24 October AD 69 in his Histories III 33 for another example of a victorious Roman army raping both women and boys. See also the earlier passage on this webpage (Livy XXVI 13 xv) and Sallust, The War with Catiline 51 ix for speeches in which it was assumed this would happen following capture of a city by Roman soldiers.
[7] In other words, boys were much more inclined than men to go along with being pedicated. Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd edition, OUP, 2010, p.205 cites these last five words, which he translates more precisely as “susceptible to being led astray and to stuprum”, as an example, along with Petronius’s story of the Pergamese boy, of how “not only was a certain degree of softness, even effeminacy, allowed boys, but the potentially troublesome facts that they might be sexually penetrated by men, and that they might derive some pleasure from the act, were occasionally acknowledged.”
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