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.