Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (6 page)

Two of the “Seven Sages” who decorated a tavern in Ostia and entertained drinkers with their advice about excretion: “Solon rubbed his belly to shit well” (on left) and “Thales recommends that if you have a hard time shitting you should strain” (on right).

Decimus Valerius Asiaticus provides a similar defense of his masculinity. This distinguished nobleman was falsely accused of a litany of crimes and moral failings by Publius Suillius Rufus, a crony of the empress Messalina, in
AD
47. Asiaticus refused to answer any of the false charges until his honor was stained with an allegation of “softness of body”—effeminacy. Then he scornfully replied, “
Suillius, cross-examine your sons
: they will testify that I am a man” (
interroga, Suilli, filios tuos: virum esse me fatebuntur
). The proof that he is
not
effeminate, not perverted—that he is a
real
man—is that he has sodomized the sons of his accuser.

Scholars refer to the model of masculinity embodied in these verbs (
futuo, pedico
, and
irrumo
) as “priapic,” after the garden god Priapus. Priapus was happy to use his giant, always erect penis to penetrate women, boys, or men, for pleasure, certainly, but also to establish who was boss.
Integral to this priapic model
of sexuality is the idea of sex as domination, as a means of exercising control. This is not to say that individuals didn’t have tender, loving sexual relations, but that in the wider cultural paradigm, sex was about power.
Many epigrams from the
Priapea
, the collection of poetry dedicated to the god, show this fusion of sex and domination. One poem has Priapus addressing potential thieves: “I warn you, boy, you will be buggered; girl, you will be fucked; a third penalty awaits the bearded thief” (
Percidere, puer, moneo; futuere, puella; barbatum furem tertia poena manet
).
Percido
literally means “to hit”—this was vulgar slang for
pedicatio
(anal sex). The third penalty refers to
irrumatio
, the proper way to have sex with adult men. On one level, this epigram is a joke—it is supposed to be spoken by an effigy of the god as he stands in a garden to protect it, and there is little he can actually do to effect his threats. On another, though, it is a very serious illustration of a very Roman idea about sexuality: that sex and aggression, sex and domination, sex and power are joined and cannot be put asunder.

Not all men, of course, enjoyed subjugating all these partners equally, as Priapus does. Virgil, whose virile verse was the model for generations of poets,
was more inclined to boys
(
libidinis in pueros pronioris
); Ovid preferred women. In his
Ars Amatoria
(
The Art of Love
), Ovid reveals that “
I hate those embraces
in which both partners do not consummate; that is why boys please me but little.” But these are just
preferences
, not exclusive sexual orientations. Virgil and Ovid slept both with men and with women; they just preferred one sex over another. You might say that they were on different ends of the Roman sexual spectrum, but still within the “normal” range. Sometimes, though, someone comes along whose inclinations are so strange that Latin lacks words for them.
The emperor Claudius was
, as the historian Suetonius writes, “of an extreme lust towards women, completely lacking in experience of males” (
libidinis in feminas profusissimae, marum omnino expers
). Suetonius is flummoxed by what we today would call a heterosexual—he has no vocabulary to describe a man who is attracted sexually only to women. He does not see this as a good thing, incidentally. His description of Claudius’s habits comes in a long list of his faults, from gluttony—he would eat so much that he would pass out, and his attendants would make him vomit with a feather—and a gambling addiction to a “cruel and bloodthirsty disposition.”

If a
vir
’s desires were as catholic as those of Priapus, he could sleep with a large proportion of Roman society.
Not everyone, however, was fair game
. It was immoral, and illegal, to sleep with freeborn women (except one’s wife), freeborn boys, or freeborn men. They possessed what was called
pudicitia
, roughly translated as “modesty,” which meant, in practice, the right not to be penetrated. Having sex with them was
stuprum
, punishable by banishment, loss of property, and loss of certain legal rights. Only slaves, freedmen and women, and prostitutes (who might have once been free but had fallen on hard times) could be solicited without censure. “Only,” though, was a large proportion of the population—
25 to 40 percent of people were slaves
in the Roman Empire, and probably an equal percentage were the freed slaves known as
liberti
.

Romans were especially concerned that no one should commit
stuprum
with freeborn boys. Boys of this class wore
special clothing
,
the
toga praetexta
(a white toga with a purple border), to mark them out as future
viri
. When they were in the public baths, they wore a
necklace called a
bulla
, which often featured one or two of those phallus-shaped
fascini
, to signify their status while naked.
This is in direct contrast to the Greeks
, whose attitude to sexuality was generally quite similar to the Romans’, except where pederasty was concerned. The Greeks saw pederasty as a rite of passage, the way a boy became a man. An older man (the
erastes
, “lover”) would choose a boy between twelve and seventeen as his
eromenos
(beloved). He acted as mentor, teaching the boy about
arete
, the Greek manly virtues, including courage, strength, fairness, and honesty. The Greeks appear to have been a bit conflicted about this, both idealizing the pederastic bond and also trying to regulate just what lovers were allowed to do with each other. No penetration was supposed to occur, for example. The
erastes
was supposed to limit himself to intercrural (between the thighs) intercourse, as shown on any number of Greek vases.

The Romans saw no dilemma. They were sure that pederasty with slaves was right and with freeborn boys was wrong. Penetration would destroy a boy’s
pudicitia
, making it impossible for him to develop into a
vir
, into a useful citizen of Rome.

cinaedus = one abused against nature, past all shame, a wanton dancer, also a fish

catamitus = a boy hired to bee abused contrarie to nature, a Ganymede
*

—John Rider,
Riders Dictionarie
, 1626

Romans had nothing but derogatory words for men or boys who allowed themselves to be penetrated, and two of the worst were
catamitus
and
cinaedus
. These are Greek loanwords, suggesting that penetrated men were thought to be not just less manly but less than fully Roman, practicing what the culture would have preferred to see as “foreign” vices.

As with stereotypes
of gay men today,
cinaedi
were supposed to have distinctive, feminine mannerisms. They took too much care over their appearance, depilating their legs, chests, and other parts of their bodies, anointing themselves with sweet-smelling lotions, and applying makeup. They sometimes wore women’s clothing, and performed female activities such as spinning wool. Scipio Aemilianus, a famous general of the Republic who presided over the destruction of Carthage (a “real” man, in other words), described what he saw as the disgusting habits of
cinaedi
: “
a man who daily is adorned
before his mirror, covered with perfumes, whose eyebrows are shaven, who walks around with his beard plucked out and his thighs depilated … who wore a long-sleeved tunic.” The long-sleeved tunic was a Greek fashion and would have prevented the wearer from being scratched by the rough hairshirt-esque wool of his toga. Manly Roman men toughed it out with only a short-sleeved tunic under their togas, or better yet, nothing.

The most surefire way to identify
a
cinaedus
, however, was that he “scratched his head with one finger.” It seems to me that scholars have enjoyed themselves mightily figuring out what this means. Some believe that the finger in question must have been the middle one, the
digitus impudicus
, already known as a sign of aggression and disrespect, from its resemblance to the erect penis. The
cinaedus
scratched his head with it to broadcast his desires to others in the know. Other scholars argue that the gesture is simply effeminate, that the
cinaedus
was so concerned about his coiffure that he wouldn’t risk disturbing it by scratching with more than one digit. The finger aside, Romans had a stereotype of the effeminate man that in many ways resembles the one we have today.

The
cinaedus
or
catamitus
is not “gay,”
though, however much he may look it. He is
passive
. He does not penetrate, the only “normal” thing for a man to do, so now all bets are off. Romans thought him likely to indulge in all sorts of head-scratchingly deviant behavior, with men and with women alike.

fello = to suck

lingo cunnum = ?

—Thomas Thomas,
Dictionarium
, 1587

Now we come finally to the worst of the worst, the most obscene, most offensive things you could say in Latin.
The worst insult you could throw at a Roman
was that he practiced
cunnum lingere
. This was deemed the most twisted of all deviant behaviors, the very height of abnormality. Following close upon it on the list of things virtuous Romans didn’t do was
fellatio
, and to be called a
fellator
was almost as bad as to be accused of
cunnilingus
.
*
What was so wrong with performing oral sex in the Roman Empire that it gave rise to the worst of Latin insults? Rome had a strong taboo against oral-genital contact (unless you were on the receiving end). Oral sex befouled the mouth,
the “most sacred part of the body
.” A mouth that has performed oral sex was dirtier than the genitals themselves, more shameful even than those parts perverted by penetration. An epigram by Martial sums up this attitude, prevalent in Roman discourse: “
Zoilus
, you spoil the bathtub washing your arse. To make it filthier, Zoilus, stick your head in it.”

Both performing fellatio and being anally penetrated were deviant (passive) sexual behaviors, but it was worse to fellate someone. Martial makes this point too:

You sleep with well-endowed boys
, Phoebus, and what stands on them doesn’t stand for you. Phoebus, I ask you, what do you wish me to suspect? I wanted to believe you a soft man, but rumor denies that you are a
cinaedus
.

Phoebus is soft (
mollis
)—effeminate, passive—and his penis is not erect, so he can’t be a
fututor, pedico
, or
irrumator
(a penetrator of vaginas, anuses, or mouths, respectively). Nor is he a
cinaedus
(“pansy,” also a fish). There is only one thing left—he must be a
fellator
, even lower on what we might call the scale of humiliation.

A man who performs fellatio is not “gay”—he is just as likely to
lingere cunnum
. These acts are two sides of the same coin: “
They are twin brothers
, but they lick different groins. Say, are they more like or unlike?” These are both passive sexual activities—neither the
fellator
nor the
cunnilingus
is penetrating anyone. As we’ve seen, a normal, “active” man will desire to penetrate women, boys, and men; a man who enjoys a “passive” activity such as fellatio will be passive with respect to women too, and to be passive with respect to women means to perform cunnilingus.

The flip side of fellatio is
irrumatio
—that is what the
fellator
’s active partner is doing. But what is the flip side of
cunnilingus
? What is the woman doing? In Roman culture, women were supposed to be sexually passive by nature. They don’t have penises and so can’t penetrate anyone (except the
tribades
, of course). With
cunnilingus
, the man is taking the passive role, so the woman must in some sense be taking the active role, performing the female equivalent of
irrumatio
. She is fucking the man in his mouth. This was horrifying to ancient Romans for two reasons. It was “unnatural”—women were not supposed to be the active partners, even by implication. And it was completely emasculating. It was bad enough for a
Roman man to be penetrated by another man, but by a woman—that was shame almost not to be borne, and too powerful an insult to pass up.

mentula = a mans yarde, his pricke, his privities

verpa = a mans yard

—Thomas Thomas,
Dictionarium
, 1596