It's interesting that so much is made of
Roman sexual orgies as an excuse to
sell the movies/depictions/etc in the modern world.
The ideal of Rome was one of chastity. Tombstones and eulogies emphasise chastity. Pudicia is
part of the
catalog of virtues. Augustus' legislation sought to enforce this ideal, albeit largely in the upper classes where, as Andrew has noted, marriages tended to be political, but the Julian Laws carry a large cultural baggage on what is considered to be right morally. Sexual excesses and perversions were frowned upon and actively fustigated, which is where so much of the remaining literature survives, be they attacks against specific people (
Cicero against Clodia, Suetonius against the
12 Caesars, Martial and Juvenal against society in general).
That literature has survived because then, as now, and even during the
christian middle ages (were it not for the monks, little would have survived)
sex sells. Few people are interested in a lengthy description of a virtuous life. That's why Dante's Inferno is more famous and more read than
his Paradiso, and why hardly anyone touches Milton's Paradise Regain'd. That's also why modern TV shows (Rome, Spartacus, etc) prefer to include largely gratuitous
sex scenes rather than other elements of
Roman society - how many people would listen to a philosophic evening at Fronto's place, or an antiquarian debate at Varro's, or - worst of all - an in-depth discussion about archaic Latin grammar as you find in Aulus Gellius (the
man who once amused himself on a journey by listing the synonyms or near-synonyms for "ship" he knew)? Somehow, these
Roman entertainments don't make it into too many shows - though the opening scene of I,
Claudius comes close.
Add to this the major discoveries of apparently sexual objects in Pompeii. This was a time when
antiquity was being seriously rediscovered, and it shocked people to find so many scenes of erotica and, largely, so many representations of phalli. If archaeologists discovered a large quantity of Playboy issues in 2000 years time or got access to some of the stuff on the internet, they'd also see our culture as hopelessly orgiastic and you can imagine what 30th century mass entertainment will show of our society. True:
Romans had a tendency to put erotic scenes on everyday objects, but for many we don't have the actual context, and for others we know that phalli on a
stone plaque in front of a house or as an elaborate tintinnabulum, for instance, indicate not that this was a house of ill repute (some people have assumed this, and came up with staggering ratios of brothels:inhabitants), but were in fact a luck charm designed to bring growth and wealth on the house and
ward of the evil eye. Many of the items which were hidden in the "Secret Cabinet" in Naples were not sexual in nature.
That's not to say that Rome was averse to sexuality. Not even the Victorian Age was, in that you did have red-light districts, after all. I'd say that their attitude to sexuality was "healthy" (apart from the helplessness against sexual diseases, of course - and some issues, such as age at marriage or slave-prostitutes, would be considered absolutely abject today), neither excessively shunned
nor overly indulged in. There were
notorious cases, or allegedly
notorious cases (Clodia,
Messalina,
Julia Augusti,
Theodora), but you'd find them in any culture and have to strip them (if I'm allowed the pun) of their political baggage. Most people in Rome would probably be too occupied looking where the next meal came from (in the lower and middle classes) and who was about to stab them in the back (actually or figuratively, in politics) to spent their days in nothing but orgies. The opportunities were there, but no more and no less than at other times in
history, including today. It just sells better to include them in modern entertainment, which says as much, if not more, about us than it does about the
Romans.
Anyway, that's my take on this.
