Sex in Ancient Rome, Plus Visiting Osaka Castle
Today, I’d like to highlight for you a couple of things I released recently. Let’s start with the most recent History on Fire episode entitled “Sex in Ancient Rome.”
I thought doing a cultural history episode about sexuality in Ancient Rome would be fun and juicy. But that’s because my memory of Roman sexuality was hazy. After refreshing it with lots of research, I can safely say that ‘fun’ is not a word I would apply to it. ‘Insanely disturbing’ is probably more fitting. Most of the ancient sources, in fact, seem to indicate that little to no attention was paid to the idea of sex being for mutual pleasure. Rather, sex was primarily seen as something to reinforce dominance and hierarchy. In this episode, I cover prison sex, rapey garden gnomes, the similarities and differences between ancient Roman and Christian sexualities, the origin of the word ‘family’ (it’s not pleasant), threatening sexual violence to prove one’s manliness, the violent myths about Rome’s founding, the Rape of the Sabine women, sex and slavery, why speaking of homosexuality or heterosexuality made no sense in Ancient Rome, legal trials as rap battles, Cicero & the art of character assassination, Mark Anthony & the art of assassinating Cicero, Augustus’ puritanism, gladiators fighting against their own wildcat-shaped phalli, Roman sexual art, and much, much more. If this doesn’t get you curious to check out the episode, I have to go back to the drawing board. If nothing else, you may want to know what’s up with the gladiator in the image above doing battle against his wildcat penis.
On a completely different note, over the past few days I have been touring Japan, helping to lead a group for Geek Nation Tours. The whole experience has been and continues to be mind-blowing. I’m currently writing you from Hiroshima, and I’ll probably write a lot more about my trip in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, I’d like to share with you a short YouTube video I shot in front of Osaka Castle, the site of the 1614-1615 siege that concluded the period of Japanese history known as the Sengoku Jidai, or warring states period. Incidentally, the renowned ronin Miyamoto Musashi (whose life I have covered in a couple of episodes of History on Fire) participated in that siege.
I hope you enjoy both the podcast episode and this short video. Infinite thanks for following my work.