THE AGE RANGE OF LOVED BOYS IN ANCIENT ROME
BY EDMUND MARLOWE

Prepubescent boys are not generally represented as objects of desire in Martial or elsewhere in Roman literature. […] The ideal male partner, the youth or boy of our sources, belonged to the age-group roughly equivalent to what is now called adolescence. For Romans, this period’s beginning was marked by the onset of puberty (generally held to occur between the twelfth and fourteenth years and to be marked by the maturation of the genitals and hence the arrival of sexual maturity, as well as by the appearance of a light down on the cheeks) and its end was marked by what they saw as the completion of the process of maturation, most notably the arrival of the full, manly beard (which is attested usually to have occurred somewhere around the twentieth year). In between those two extremes lay the golden years, the “flower of youth” (flos aetatis), when boys were no longer prepubescent children, but not yet men; when they were at the peak of desirability.
     - Craig A. Williams^[1]

One aspect of the advanced hellenization of Roman élite society was the adoption of pederasty, or paedophilia as we would term it (there is no point in mincing words, since the boys were for preference prepubescent).
     - Roland Mayer^[2]

 

How can two learned professors specialising in Roman history come to such contradictory conclusions about Roman sexuality? Part of the answer is that discussion of Greek love has long been bedevilled by muddled use of the word “puberty”. Scientific understanding has long been that puberty is a process rather than a sudden event, and indeed this is clearly implied by the word “pubescent”, which means someone who has left the first stage of puberty (nowadays at around the age of ten; formerly a little older) and not yet entered the fifth and final stage (around the age of fifteen).^[3] And yet Mayer and many others speak of puberty as something much more fixed: I think it is clear that what they really mean is spermarche, the point at which a boy becomes capable of ejaculation (nowadays at around twelve and a half; according to Aristotle, around the 14^th birthday^[4]).

This posited misunderstanding is at least the charitable interpretation of Mayer’s claim that Roman pederasty was about “paedophilia” (which, as he implies, is directed towards prepubescents) and “prepubescent” boys, since otherwise he is plain wrong. The youngest boy ever referred to as the beloved of a man in Roman literature was Glaucias, described at length in a eulogy by Statius.^[5] He died around the time of his twelfth birthday. By then he was established as the elderly Melior’s beloved, so he must have been such at eleven, in his “twelfth” year as Williams accurately gives the lower limit in age, but there is no evidence that he had been any younger. Reasonably, one can only guess that he had not reached spermarche (hence Mayer’s likely misunderstanding), but that he was pubescent and thus sexual interest in him would have been, in modern psychiatric jargon, “hebephilic”, not pedophilic.

However, Mayer’s other claim, that the boys Roman men liked “were for preference prepubescent” is far harder to justify even if one allows for his misunderstanding that early pubescents are prepubescents. Where is there a shred of evidence suggesting that any Roman preferred boys who had not reached spermarche over those who had? Nowhere.

Evidence for “somewhere around the twentieth year”, in other words around nineteen, as the age at which the boy’s maturation into a man was, as Williams says, complete, meaning he was no longer sexually attractive to men in general, comes from Livy’s account of the scandal that broke out in Rome in 186 BC over a Bacchic cult; he described how, as it degenerated into an excuse for pederastic orgies, only those under twenty were initiated.^[6] Many examples can be adduced of youths in their later teens being loved. Antinous, the publicly-venerated beloved of the Emperor Hadrian, died still loved at most probably almost nineteen.^[7] The future dictator Julius Caesar was eighteen or nineteen when the King of Bithynia was believed to have had an affair with him. Two examples are known of Roman officers who were condemned over affairs with boys in the army, which boys could not join until they were sixteen: Laetorius in about 312 BC,^[8] and Gaius Lusius in 104 BC. Giton, the loved boy in Petronius’s Satyricon was also sixteen.

Readers expecting a long catalogue of boys of known ages to support a detailed assessment of the age of loved boys in ancient Rome should be aware that exact age is a very modern obsession and Romans, like most pre-modern peoples, did not consider it of much importance. Whereas it is almost certain that any modern narrative of Greek love, fictional or not, will promptly introduce the boy’s age as a point of critical interest, mentions of this in ancient literature are very rare and incidental. For the eros to make sense to the general reader, it was enough that the loved one was a boy, as opposed to a man or truly pre-pubescent child. It is clear from the abundant writings of poets like Martial that boys were sharply distinguished from mature men, above all by being “smooth”, that is to say beardless and free of bodily hair, and also by being “tender” with willowy figures, but then as always, there were surely  a few nineteen-year-olds of whom this was still true even while most had become too manly. Contra Mayer, bodily hair implicitly meant coarse non-pubic bodily hair (such as men have) and did not include moderate pubic hair (such as women too have), otherwise it is impossible that there should have been so much focus on boys in their mid teens.

A particularly telling story was recounted by the historian Josephus.^[9] In 37 BC, the Roman triumvir Mark Antony’s close friend Dellius came to Judaea, where he was overwhelmed by the beauty of King Herod’s young wife and her brother Aristoboulos. Knowing well his friend’s enthusiasm for indulging himself sexually despite considerable possible political cost, Dellius arranged for portraits of both girl and boy to be sent to Antony. The latter then decided to secure Aristoboulos alone, not because he preferred boys (no preference is recorded), but because even he realised that trying to steal a passionately-loved queen from her husband for his erotic pleasure was going too far.^[10] He therefore asked Herod to send Aristoboulos to him. Herod of course realised what Antony was about and pondered what to do, and it was only at this point that Aristoboulos’s age was introduced into the narrative as a consideration. Herod realised that because the boy was “just sixteen”, the most powerful man in the East would easily seduce him if he were delivered and that, since the boy belonged to the old royal family of Judaea, it would be dangerous for himself to lose control of him. He therefore declined diplomatically.  The point here is that, from the way the story is told, one gathers that, for a Roman sensualist, the sex of a beautiful youngster was a minor consideration and whether he were twelve or sixteen an even lesser one: all that was needed to inflame Antony’s imagination was that he or she should be exceptionally beautiful.

If one is to agree with Professor Mayer that “there is no point in mincing words,” then I fear there is no choice but to say he was untruthful. There can be no misunderstanding on the part of one so knowledgeable, and yet there is not a scrap of evidence to show that any Roman had or wanted to have sex with a truly prepubescent boy. The ancient sources abundantly support Williams’s contention that Roman men wanted boys between eleven and nineteen (albeit with caveats against older boys in this range who had developed overly manly characteristics), and there is no evidence to suggest they preferred boys low in that range over boys in its middle.

The evidence thus shows that the full age range of the desired boy in ancient Rome roughly matched the age range of loved boys in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 and the age range of loved boys in traditional Japan. In saying this, it should be stressed that this was the age of boys to whom men in general in these societies were expected to be drawn (the assumption that men in general were consciously attracted to boys as well as women being well-documented, but beyond the remit of the present essay). I am not for a moment suggesting there were not small minorities of men attracted to men or unambiguously prepubescent boys. The former, subjected to a certain amount of unkind ridicule as cinaedi (inverts), are widely-attested. The latter are nowhere mentioned in Roman literature, but that only means they happened not to be found worth mentioning: always a tiny minority, their voice is generally silent in history.

^[1] Craig A. Williams (editor), Martial, Epigrams Book II, edited by Craig A. Williams, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 175 [for the first sentence]; Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2^nd edition, OUP, 2010, p. 19 [for the rest].

^[2] Horace, Odes Book I edited by Roland Mayer, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 84-5.

^[3] Here I am following the division of pubescence into five stages conventionally used in medicine since it was set out by James Tanner in 1948.

^[4] “The male first begins to produce seed, as a rule, on the completion of twice seven years.” (Aristotle, History of Animals 581a)

^[5] Pub. Papinius Statius, Silvae II.

^[6] The reason was not simply that the under-twenties were presumed desirable, but that they were more susceptible to wanting to be pedicated. See the article Roman History by Livy, especially footnote 7.

^[7] He was described as an ephebe as well as a meirakion, and the counless busts of him give a fair indication of his age. See the article Hadrian and Antinous.

^[8] Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings VI xi.

^[9] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XV 23-30.

^[10] Josephus says Antony was also worried by the likely reaction of Cleopatra, with whom he was already living, to his taking on another queen as his mistress; apparently she would not mind sharing him with a boy.