Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (6 page)

Not every adulterous woman in Egypt was treated with such savagery. The hocus-pocus in the stories of Pheros and Webaoner only illustrates the most extreme cases. Unless an Egyptian wife was caught in the act—in which case her husband would be forgiven for killing her in a fit of rage—she was most likely punished by having her nose slit or cut off; her lover could be given a thousand lashes. Not pleasant, to be sure—but hardly as bad as being dragged to the deep by a magic crocodile.
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GOOD GOATS, BAD SHEEP, AND LONG-SUFFERING SLAVES

Female adultery was one of the worst sex crimes in the ancient world, but there were many others. The first written laws covered the full gamut of sexual behavior from intercourse with cows and horses to affairs with another’s slave. Sex itself was also used as a form of punishment. In Assyria, a married man who raped a virgin was considered a criminal, but it was his wife who paid the worse penalty: The law required that she be given up to be raped by the victim’s father. In Egypt around 1000 BC, bestiality was both punishment and blessing, depending on the animal and the circumstances. Men who damaged stone property markers were forced to give up their wives and children to be raped by donkeys, but sex with goats was regarded as a form of divine devotion. Herodotus later tells us that goats were often seen as incarnations of the procreative god Pan. In countless instances, woman worshipped the goat god by copulating with specially trained bucks in temples.

Hittite punishments for sex with animals also depended on the particular beast involved. Cows, dogs, and sheep were strictly off-limits. Any man taking one of them for his pleasure was subject to the death penalty. The king was permitted to spare the animal lover’s life, but the man would be treated as unclean and would never be allowed in the king’s company “lest he defile the royal person.” Sexual relations with horses and mules were permitted, but reluctantly. Men who enjoyed the intimate company of these animals would not risk execution, but they were barred from approaching the king and from becoming priests. Oxen and pigs were treated as potential sexual predators: Any ox that turned from its labor and “leaped” on a man “in sexual excitement” was to be killed. The man would escape execution, but a sheep was killed in his place. As for pigs, the law was clear that it was “not an offense” when a pig raped a man—but if the man was the sexual initiator, he was put to death.

Rape between human beings was also dealt with according to who was doing the raping and who was suffering it. We have already considered the penalties for raping betrothed virgins. Husbands, of course, could never be charged with raping their own wives; the idea would have been regarded as incomprehensible, if not insane. Men owned their wives, and were at liberty to use them at their pleasure. Men also owned their slaves, though slaves were not technically people and thus had far fewer rights. Giving oneself to one’s master sexually was part of the job description. The question in terms of the law was what to do when a freeman had sex with another freeman’s slave without first obtaining permission. On that subject, ancient lawmakers had
much
to say.

As far back as the days of Ur-Nammu, in the third millennium BC, the penalty for raping a slave girl was as trivial as a speeding ticket is today. A fine of five silver shekels was levied, but that was it. It was not much different in Babylon, where the fine for taking another man’s virgin slave girl rose to twenty silver shekels, and so on into the era of Hammurabi. In one famous Babylonian case, again before the Assembly of Nippur, a man named Lugalmelam was accused by the slave owner Kuguzana of “seizing” his slave girl, dragging her into a building, and then “deflowering” her. Lugalmelam denied everything, but Kuguzana found witnesses to back up his charges. The assembly decided that Lugalmelam had indeed taken the girl “without her owner’s knowledge,” and charged him a substantial fine.

It need hardly be pointed out that no one asked Kuguzana’s slave whether or not she had consented to having sex with Lugalmelam. The only consent that mattered was that of her owner. Slaves were bought and sold like animals, given as gifts, offered in payment of debts, and shipped abroad as merchandise. At any moment in their perilous lives, their owners could use them as they wished. Even the rules against sex within families were loosened when slaves were involved, as no one recognized that slaves themselves could have families as such. Under the laws of the Hittites, for example, if a freeman had sex with sisters and their mother, “it [was] an abomination,” but if he slept with slave sisters and their mother, “it [was] not an offense.”

The cruelty of slavery was nevertheless sometimes softened, especially when slaves produced children for their masters. Under the Code of Hammurabi, a slave concubine who bore her master’s children was automatically freed after he died. If a slave owner was forced to hand over a female slave to pay a debt, moreover, he was allowed to buy her back later if she had already given him children. This situation must have come up with some regularity, as female slaves were often used as surrogate mothers. When a freeman’s wife was unable to have children, she was permitted to find a slave woman to do the job. The slave was then given certain additional rights, though not enough to challenge the wife’s position in the household. The laws of Lipit-Ishtar required that the slave mother not live in the house of her masters. The Babylonians went one step further, explicitly allowing the wife to continue treating the slave-mother as a piece of property.

The rape of a married woman incurred the death penalty only when it took place on the open road, and only if the woman had vigorously fought back. The fact that the sex occurred outdoors, and that she did her best to stop it, helped show that she was taken by surprise and was not looking to have an affair. If she was at home when the sex occurred, the suspicion of bad intentions on her part was almost impossible to shake. The Hittites, in fact, resolved cases of home rape against the wife even before it occurred:

If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), it is the man’s offense, but if he seizes her in her house, it is the woman’s offense: the woman shall die. If the woman’s husband discovers them in the act, he may kill them without committing a crime.
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PROSTITUTION, SACRED AND PROFANE

The rules changed when sex was for sale. Prostitution was a legal transaction like any other, so long as it was carried out according to custom and respectable women were not involved. An Assyrian man who had sex with a married woman in a tavern or brothel (which were often one and the same) could be put to death for taking another man’s wife, but his knowledge of the fact that she was married would first have to be proven—which could be difficult, given the circumstances. If he could show that he had believed he was paying a single woman for her company, then no one could lay a hand on him, even if she had been married to an aristocrat.

In Egypt, religion and prostitution were closely associated. The Egyptian goddess Isis was, among her many other incarnations, a whore. At first, prostitution was barred from religious precincts. However, by the time the geographer Strabo traveled in Egypt in 25 BC, customs had changed. In the temple of Zeus, prepubescent girls were being served up for men’s pleasure:

To Zeus they consecrate one of the most beautiful girls of the most illustrious family . . . She becomes a prostitute and has intercourse with whomever she wishes, until the . . . purification of her body [by menstruation] takes place. After her purification, she is given in marriage to a man, but before the marriage and after her time as a prostitute, a . . . ceremony of mourning is celebrated in her honor.

Herodotus wrote of another girl who had got into the trade: the daughter of the pharaoh Khufu (or Cheops, 2589–2566 BC). Her life was decidedly unglamorous, however. She was put to work on her back to pay for her father’s death monument:

When [Khufu] was short of money, he sent his daughter to a bawdy house with instructions to charge a certain sum—they did not tell me how much. This she actually did, adding to it a further transaction of her own; for with the intention of leaving something to be remembered by after her death, she asked each of her customers to give her a block of stone, and of these stones (the story goes) was built the middle pyramid of the three which stand in front of the great pyramid. It is a hundred and fifty feet square.

That’s a lot of stones, and a lot of clients.

Another story from Herodotus told of the Thracian prostitute Rhodipus, a beauty whose hard work in Egypt brought her great fame and wealth, some of which she used to dedicate temples at Delphi. Rhodipus worked with the opportunities she had: Selling sex, sacred or otherwise, was one of the few ways unmarried women could get ahead. In Egypt, women were nearly equal to men under the law—but only in theory. Only money could buy true independence, and there were few ways in Egypt for women to earn their own living. Unless they were supported by men, their options were limited to prostitution, the performing arts, or, as was often the case, a little of each at the same time. The droves of prostitutes who did not reach the heights of Rhodipus trailed construction crews to building sites and followed pilgrims to religious destinations. It was tough going and made for short, bitter lives.

No Mesopotamian civilization attached any stigma or restriction to prostitution. By 1750 BC, during Hammurabi’s reign, the city of Babylon was busy with trade (both male and female) in the temples and on the streets. Temple prostitutes were the most desirable, and the most expensive. Their precise religious function is unclear, but it seems they worked both as skilled pleasure-givers and as intermediaries between customers/worshippers and temple deities. Whether the path to godliness truly ran through the body of a woman selling sex is anyone’s guess, but this was doubtless a profitable form of worship. The earnings of sacred prostitutes comprised a substantial part of the temples’ revenues.

The Babylonians forced
all
women to put in time as temple prostitutes. According to Herodotus: “[E]very woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go to the temple of Aphrodite and there give herself to a strange man.” Only after they had performed this duty were they permitted to leave. The scene at the temple was chaotic, with women and customers constantly coming and going. Women from the wealthy classes arrived to do their service in covered carriages with dozens of servants milling about, while others showed up on foot. Special gangways were installed to permit the men to stroll through the assembled females and make their selections. “Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin in her lap and taken her outside to lie with her,” Herodotus continues. The attractive ones were plucked up right away, while the homely ones were sometimes forced to remain on display at the temple for years. Once their service was done, the women were off-limits once again.

Attractive Babylonian women also assisted their less beguiling neighbors in finding a mate. Once a year, all girls of marriageable age were collected from their villages to be auctioned off to prospective husbands. The pretty ones from good families were taken first, often after furious bidding, while “the humbler [men], who had no use for good looks in a wife, were actually paid to take the ugly ones.” When all the attractive women had been sold, the auctioneer “would call upon the plainest one to stand up, and then ask who was willing to take the least money to marry her—and she was knocked down to whoever accepted the smallest sum.” The money came from the sales of the beauties, “who in this way provided dowries for their ugly or misshapen sisters.”

Men lacking the means to purchase temple whores could frequent downscale taverns and wine shops. Both the prostitutes and the (mostly) female proprietors of these dives were seen as a sluttish, thieving lot. Drinking houses were often hideouts for fugitive bandits, which is why Hammurabi took pains to control them, while imposing no restrictions on the tavern-based prostitution within. A barkeep marketing prostitutes in her back room was liable for nothing more than taxes, but faced capital punishment if she overheard customers talking about a crime and failed to turn them in.

Strict dress codes had the dual effect of putting prostitutes on perpetual display as well as making clear which women were unavailable for rent. From the earliest Sumerian times, married women went veiled. By the Middle Assyrian period, this tradition had evolved into a harsh law that made veiling a privilege of the better classes. Prostitutes and slaves were not permitted to go about veiled. Conversely, all daughters, wives, widows, and other women of status were to be covered in public. Prostitutes caught wearing veils had hot pitch poured on their heads and were beaten with fifty blows. Such punishment left them disfigured and, undoubtedly, less salable. Slaves who hid their faces in public, meanwhile, stood to lose their ears and their clothes.
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HOMOSEXUALITY BEFORE MORALITY

Before the biblical period, sex law had nothing to do with morality as we know it, nor was forbidden sex laden with the psychology of guilt. The main question concerned the protection of property. The founding principle of sex regulation was that women were possessions to be cultivated for marriage and childbirth, or used for sex and then discarded. A husband was free to fornicate to his heart’s content, because it had no effect on his property. His wife, of course, could be put to death for doing the same thing.

The question then turns to whether or not men had the option of fornicating with other
men
, and the short answer is that they usually did. Before the Hebrews labeled male-male sex an abomination of the worst kind, there were almost no restrictions against it. As detailed as the early legal codes were on the subject of sex, same-gender relations were mostly ignored—not because homosexual sex did not take place (it certainly did), but because there was no reason to actively restrict it: Anal sex generally was subject to no taboos, and sexual escapades among men constituted no more of an interruption to their marriages than their dalliances with female prostitutes or slaves. Male prostitutes even worked in the Babylonian temple of the mother-goddess Ishtar at Erach, where they were known as men “whose manhood Ishtar has changed into womanhood.”