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A major source of what we know about the amorous
indulgences of ancient omnipotents is The Twelve Ceasars by Gaius
Suetonius Tranquillus, who was chief secretary to the Roman emperor
Hadrian (who ruled 117-38 A.D.) Suetonius had access to the imperial
annals, and was able to draw on them in his biographical sketches of
Rome’s first dozen emperors. Although it is his only surviving work,
we know he also penned what had to have been an at least equally juicy
volume, The Lives of Famous Whores.
Suetonius starts with
Julius (100-44 B.C.), the first Caesar. Even as a general in Gaul he was
sung of
in this ribald Latin verse back in Rome, as rendered by Robert Graves in
his landmark translation of The Twelve Ceasars:
Home we bring our bald whoremonger:
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.
After he got back and became emperor, he did
exactly what the quatrain warned of by helping himself to the wives of
numerous Roman patricians. For a husband so cuckolded, though, the price
of complaining was prohibitive—angering an emperor could be fatal.
Julius was also bisexual (sex with male slaves was common among Roman
men, but for a married man, adultery with women other than prostitutes
was frowned upon), being described by a contemporary as “every
queen’s man and every man’s queen.” But as it turns out, Julius
was tame in comparison with some of his successors.
Tiberius
(42 B.C.-37 A.D.) had an entire island converted into a pleasure garden
and peopled it with “bevies of young women and men, from all over the
world, who were adept in unnatural practices,” who would perform for
the emperor in groups of three. Rooms decorated with pornographic
paintings and statuary and staffed with concubines of either sex who
were required to study Egyptian sex manuals were available for the
ruler. And for al fresco debauchery among the forests and glades of the
island, boys and girls attired as Pans and nymphs stood waiting outside
of caves and grottos.
Tiberius
probably was the most sexually depraved of the early emperors on account
of his pedophilia. Translators of Suetonius before Robert Graves simply
refused to include passages like this: “Some aspects of his criminal
obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe. Imagine
training little boys, whom he called his ‘minnows,’ to chase him
while he was swimming and get between his legs to suck and nibble him.
Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother’s breast suck at
him-such a filthy old man he had become!” After all, there was nothing
to stop him, and the Romans had no concept in their pagan religion of an
afterlife with possible punishment for earthly sins.
Leaving
Rome for a moment, Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra VII (69-30 B.C.) had a
robust libido on steroids. Known by sobriquets such as “the great
swallower,” and “she who gapes wide for ten thousand men,” she was
said to be highly skilled at fellatio. Tradition holds that she
performed oral sex on a hundred Roman noblemen in a single night (blow
jobs evidently were a national pastime in the land of the
pyramids—it’s worth mentioning that lipstick was first worn there by
women wishing to advertise their fondness for giving head).
But that feat pales in comparison with how quickly
Cleopatra met the eligibility requirement for becoming a High Priestess
of Aset, which was having fucked 1,000 men. The story goes that it took
her only 10 days to accomplish this, although some hyperbole may be
assumed.
One of the worst emperors, Nero (37-68 A.D.), was
seduced by his mother, Aggripina, and is remembered for fiddling while
Rome burned (the fiddle actually didn’t come along until the Middle
Ages). According to Suetonius, Nero would stage elaborate fantasies like
having temporary brothels built on the banks of the Tiber with
noblewomen posing as madams waiting outside them, and then sailing down
the Tiber and taking his pick of the women. Or this: “Nero practiced
every kind of obscenity,” Suetonius writes, “and at last he invented
a novel game: He was released from a den dressed in the skins of wild
animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound
to stakes. After working up sufficient excitement by this means, he was
dispatched—shall we say?—by his freedman Doryphorus. Doryphorus now
married him—just as he himself had married Sporus—and on the wedding
night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered.”
Both men had been castrated and forced to undergo what are described as
sex-change surgeries, reminding us that the lasciviousness of some of
the emperors was nothing next their cruelty.
Although bisexuality among the emperors was the rule, with their
complete freedom to follow their fancy, there naturally were exceptions.
Of the first 12, only Claudius (10 B.C.-54 A.D.) was purely
heterosexual. Suetonius remarks, “His feelings for women were
extremely passionate, but men and boys left him cold.” On the other
hand, the emperor Galba (3 B.C.-69 A.D.) was gay: “A homosexual
invert, he showed a decided preference for mature, sturdy men. It is
said that when Icleus, one of his trusty bedfellows, brought the news of
Nero’s death, Galba showered him with kisses and begged him to undress
without delay, whereupon intimacy took place.”
So
what sense do you make of it all? In a 1959 essay on Suetonius, Gore
Vidal, author of the novel Julian, wrote (and here we may include
Cleopatra), “From the sexual opportunism of Julius Caesar to the
sadism of Nero to the doddering pederasty of Galba, the sexual lives of
the Caesars encompassed every aspect of what our post-medieval time has
termed ‘sexual abnormality.’ It would be wrong, however, to dismiss,
as so many commentators have, the wide variety of Caesarean sensuality
as simply the viciousness of twelve abnormal men. They were, after all,
a fairly representative lot. They differed from us—and their
contemporaries—only in the fact of power, which made it possible for
each to act out his most recondite sexual fantasies. This is the
psychological fascination of Suetonius. What will men so placed do? The
answer, apparently, is anything and everything.”
List of Metroland Stories by Glenn Weiser
©2002 by Glenn Weiser. All rights reserved.
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