This is the kind of shit I was talking about yesterday. The Roman world wasn& #39;t this idyllic landscape of free, lauded male-male love that we can criticize our modern culture over. The way we treat homosexuality in the modern western world in 2020 is *by far* the superior mode.

The first point to make is that "Gay" or "Homosexual" are ahistoric terms to use. They didn& #39;t exist until well into the modern period. Romans wouldn& #39;t have seen, described, or identified someone else or themselves as "gay" or "a homosexual".

Instead, what we today would call a homosexual act tied into the ways in n which Romans performed masculinity. A masculine Roman man was a very anxious, fragile thing; constantly trying to preserve his civic and sexual integrity.

In the context of sex what was lauded was two things. First, sexual temperance; hypersexuality was one of the worst accusations you could make of someone. The second was tied to status; it was encouraged for Roman men to engage in *active* sex acts, not *passive* ones.

So it was totally acceptable to have active, dominant sex with other men. The stereotype is of an upperclass Roman man having penetrative sex with a younger boy, slave, or servant. Receptive sex acts of the same were shameful. They were obsessed with sexual dominance to a degree.

This cut both ways regardless of gender; it was accepted to be the active sex partner with a woman, to dominate a woman, but it was intensely shameful for a man to give oral sex to a woman because to a Roman mind you were "submitting" to a woman. Scandalous!