An old commentator adds: Prostabant autem meretrices ad lucernas.
Acca Larentia was a Roman goddess whose festival—the Larentalia or Larentinalia—fell on December 23. The tradition was that she herself had been a prostitute. Her festival was a fertility ritual, as in the case of Lupa and Flora.
There was a tradition that the Emperor Heliogabalus sponsored a brothel in Rome called Senatulus Mulierum: The Little Senate of Women.
Nonariae were public prostitutes in Rome who were not allowed to appear before the ninth hour. The satirist Persius refers to this custom:
The ancients believed that the feminine lips had some relation to the genitalia: and likewise that a prominent nose indicated a corresponding membrum virile. There is evidence of this view in a short epigram by the Roman poet Martial:
Ovid
One of the richest sources of eroticism is the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, commonly called in English Ovid. Born in 43 B.C., he reached the greatest literary and social heights of his time, but, falling under imperial disfavor, he ended his life in bleak and desolate banishment.
At Rome he acquired a deep knowledge of rhetoric, both academic and applied, and then continued his studies in Athens. As was then usual, he subsequently made the grand tour of the East. Although he was destined, by his family’s wishes, for a career in law, Ovid dedicated himself to his supreme and exclusive love, the poetic Muse.
His output was tremendous. He addressed a certain Corinna in a series of love elegies. He wrote fictional poetic letters of enamoured women. His Metamorphoses describes strange changes undergone by mortals and divinities in pursuit of love. His Love Letters of Heroines, Directions for a Lady’s Cosmetic Preparations, the Art of Love, and the Remedies for Love belong in a common category.
The principal climactic situation in his life was his banishment, by the imperial mandate of the Emperor Augustus, to the desolation of Tomis, on the Black Sea. He had to abandon his wife and home—he had been married three times—, his literary friends, and his social circle. It was a kind of living death, a spiritual and intellectual cataclysm. At Tomis, a wild, barbaric, inhospitable spot, Ovid spent the remaining years of his life, in regret and supplications fruitlessly addressed to the Emperor, and in writing, particularly his Tristia, Sad Themes.
The reason for the banishment is still obscure, although Ovid himself hints at a ‘poem and a blunder.’ The poem was his Art of Love, which was frowned upon imperially and excluded from the public libraries in the Roman capital. The blunder of which Ovid was apparently guilty was associated, as he declares, with his possession of eyes—that is, he may have been a spectator or observer of some adulterous act involving the imperial family. Whatever the factual reason, the Emperor remained obdurate to the poet’s pleas, and Ovid died in exile.
In the voluminous corpus of poetic accomplishment, Ovid produced many major contributions to erotic literature. His Ars Amatoria is a universal handbook to love and its manifestations. His Amores is a sequence of amorous vignettes. His Remedia Amoris, Remedies for Love, constitutes a body of amatory expiations that in spite of their negative tone are as voluptuously and cynically libidinous as his forthright prescriptions. In all, here is a body of themes, views, techniques that expound the most intimate secrets of the boudoir and the salon, of the entire range of erotic manifestations. Among his known contemporaries Ovid became a kind of arch-consultant in love, the ultimate arbiter of dalliance, the poetic confessor of sensual delights. And continuously through the ages his poetic presentations, descriptions, enumerations, his almost legalized counsel in debauchery, translated into most European languages, have served as a final, authoritative, cynical and libidinous source book.
Ovid probes into both normal and perverted forms of amatory experience, and reveals in vivid and not infrequently lurid detail, the sophisticated gallantries, the urbane wantonness, the suave and polished salaciousness, and the cultivated prurience of the Roman capital during the first century before the Christian era.
In respect of the means of inspiring and promoting amatory activity, both in men and women, Ovid has many pointed things to say about potions. In Latin, the poculum amatorium is the common expression used to designate the potion, that is, the love-goblet.
Ovid’s primary theme, in these exciting productions of his, is: Love is a campaign, long and ruthless. It requires skill, training, equipment, strategy, vision. So, in his pleas to Corinna his poetic offerings are in the nature of addresses to Woman, tantalizing, shameless, an epitome of feminine wiles and graces.
As stimuli toward erotic diversions, Ovid generously and without resentment recommends, in addition to his own poetic manuals, his Roman contemporaries Propertius and Tibullus, the elegiac poets, as well as Vergil: and, among the Greeks, the erotic lyrics and occasional pieces of Callimachus and Philetas, Anacreon and Sappho.
In Book 3 of the Metamorphoses we have the story of Narcissus, enamoured aphrodisiacally by his own image reflected in a pool. The image of himself is so clearly defined, the lips move so appealingly in response to his own pleas, that he is ready to succumb amorously. Then he realizes the truth, that he and his reflection are one, his own self, his very identity. And he longs to free himself from himself, to escape the duplication. By this imaginative and symbolical mythological design, Ovid is unquestionably stressing the erotic passion itself, the frenzied ecstasy to detach oneself from one’s own being, the clamor of man against his fettered self and his erotic agonies.
A potion may appear in various guises. A vision of beauty can itself act like an enriched, stimulating philtre. The enraptured glance sends its erotic pronouncement to the enraptured heart, and the potion is virtually consummated. So, it seemed to Ovid, was the strange episode involving the sculptor Pygmalion:
The realism of the sculptured figure, together with the aroused passion of the artist, produced a kind of symbiotic philtre, a flaming, kinetic periapt.
In Book 1 of the Ars Amatoria Ovid introduces his basic subject: love unrestrained, Aphrodite Pandemos, patroness of free love, of passion unconfined:
And, in a brief preface, he offers an epitome of early Roman history, which is equated succinctly with military prowess and sexual prowess:
Now Ovid dwells on wine as an amatory stimulant, a virtual flaming potion:
Practice all the variations conceivable in winning your designated conquest, Ovid advises recurrently. Your wit and suavity will prevail: far more, in fact, than artificial aids, such as philtres. Philtres, Ovid asserts from the richness of his erotic experience, are futile in the contests of love:
Pallid philtres given to girls were of no avail. Philtres harm the mind and produce an impact of madness.
He enumerates many items that were popularly reputed to possess aphrodisiac properties. But you should shun them, he reiterates, for their effect is minimal. Hippomanes, the excrescence on a new-born colt, is ineffectual: similarly with the traditional magic herbs purchased furtively from some wizened old hag. Reject, equally, formulas for exorcism and similar enchantments. The best love philtre, in short, is the lover’s own passion. Even the ancient enchantress Circe, whom Homer describes so vividly, could not, by the aid of her occult devices, prevent the unfaithfulness of Ulysses: nor could the tumultuous Medea, practiced in the lore of the sorceress, combat the waywardness of Jason.
It is true, the poet acknowledges, that in the popular mind many objects, grasses, roots are associated with the virtues of the love potion: but erroneously so, he adds. He lists the items as follows:
Morality, especially sexual morality, descended to its most degenerative nadir in the period of the Roman Empire. The poets and satirists, the historians and the moralists all uniformly fulminate against the profligacies of Roman matrons, particularly in the upper social levels and in the court circles, and blast and condemn the utter licentiousness, lewdness, and abandonment of all restraints.
Seneca the philosopher asserts:
Anything assailed by countless desires is insecure. And the young and even more mature matrons, descendants of distinguished figures in the tumultuous sequence of Roman history, were exposed to every kind of inducement to laxity, every urgent temptation, domestically, publicly, and politically. There was a vogue of indiscriminate flirtation, highly skilled, ingeniously practiced, that led into violent passion and into adultery, into incest and multiple perversions. Lust became the primary satisfaction, and its consummation was the most common, the most clamant factor in the social frame.
Even the earlier days of the Roman Republic were, as the poet Horace declares—and he was the Augustan Poet Laureate—‘rich in sin.’ Propertius too confirms this view, and goes one step further. The sea, he suggests, will be dried up and the stars torn from heaven before women reform their immoral ways.
The entire nation, rich and prosperous, masters of the universe, overwhelmed and sated with exotic luxuries, attended, for their every whim, by hordes of slaves, had lost all human modesty, all human virtues. Yet all was not entirely lost, for voices cried out, however feebly and helplessly, in the midst of their successions of wantonness and orgies.
The poet Ovid wryly says:
Only those women are chaste who are unsolicited, and a man who is enraged at his wife’s amours is merely a boor.
Seneca says again, in respect of married women: A woman who is content to have two lovers only is a paragon.
For adultery and divorce were the usual recreations of many Roman matrons in Imperial times. Marriage itself was often a mere formality, and it implied no loyalties, no honor. Some women, declares Seneca, counted the years not by the consuls, but by the number of husbands they had.
And the Church Father, Tertullian, added later, in the same vein: Women marry, only to divorce. Ovid himself, the archpoet of love, was married three times. Caesar had four wives in succession. Mark Antony also had four. Sulla the statesman and Pompey each had five wives. Pliny the Younger had three wives. Martial the epigrammatist mentions a certain Phileros who had seven wives.
Women were no better, no less restless. Tullia, Cicero’s daughter, had three husbands. The Emperor Nero was the third husband of Poppaea, and the fifth of Messalina. The poet Martial refers to a woman who had eight husbands, and to another who was suspected of murdering her seven husbands, one after the other.
Every passion, every illicit amour, was a provocation to the Roman women. They had intrigues with their slaves, with actors and pantomimists, with jockeys, charioteers, gladiators, and flute-players.
Roman temples were rendez-vous, and prostitution and adultery were practiced among the altars and in the cells that were heavy with incense. In a striking passage, Tertullian personifies Idolatry, who confesses: My sacred groves of pilgrimage, my mountains and springs, my city temples, all know how I corrupt chastity.
Astrological and magic techniques contributed to the already degenerate Romans of the Empire. Old hags practiced procuring and other dubious trades. They prepared drugs and potions and salves for beauty and passion and poisoning. In time, these practices assumed a mysterious aura. They absorbed the secret cults of the Nile and the Ganges and the Euphrates. Some of the practitioners were actually reputable, dignified, eagerly sought after by women. Lucian describes a certain Alexander of Abonuteichos—stately, with well-trimmed beard, penetrating look, modulated voice. He wore a wig of flowing locks. He was dressed in a white and purple tunic, and a white cloak, and in his hand he carried a scythe.