Again, though a Horace would use polite expressions in addressing Tyndaris or Lalage, the Latin tongue was much freer than any modern one. There is not a Latin author of the best age in whose writings the coarsest words can not be found. The comedies were frightfully obscene, both in ideas and expressions. A youth or a maiden could not begin to acquire instruction without meeting words of the grossest meaning. The convenient adage, Charta non erubescit, was invented to hide the pruriency of authors, and one of the worst puts in the wretched plea that, “though his page is lewd, his life is pure.” It is quite certain that, whatever might have been the effect on the poet, his readers could not but be demoralized by the lewdness of his verses.
Add to these causes of immorality the baths, and a fair case in support of Juvenal will be already made out. A young Roman girl, with warm southern blood in her veins, who could gaze on the unveiled pictures of the loves of Venus, read the shameful epigrams of Martial, or the burning love-songs of Catullus, go to the baths and see the nudity of scores of men and women, be touched herself by a hundred lewd hands, as well as those of the bathers who rubbed her dry and kneaded her limbs—a young girl who could withstand such experiences and remain virtuous would need, indeed, to be a miracle of principle and strength of mind.
But even then religion and law remained to assail her. She could not walk through the streets of Rome without seeing temples raised to the honor of Venus, that Venus who was the mother of Rome, as the patroness of illicit pleasures. In every field and in many a square, statues of Priapus, whose enormous indecency was his chief characteristic, presented themselves to view, often surrounded by pious matrons in quest of favor from the god. Once a year, at the Lupercalia, she saw young men running naked through the streets, armed with thongs with which they struck every woman they saw; and she noticed that matrons courted this flagellation as a means of becoming prolific. What she may have known of the Dionysia or Saturnalia, the wild games in honor of Bacchus, and of those other dissolute festivals known as the eves of Venus, which were kept in April, it is not easy to say, but there is no reason to believe that these lewd scenes were intended only for the vicious, or that they were kept a secret.
When her marriage approached the remains of her modesty were effectually destroyed. Before marriage she was led to the statue of Mutinus, a nude sitting figure, and made to sit on his knee,[129] ut ejus pudicitiam prius deus delibasse videtur. This usage was so deeply rooted among the Romans that, when Augustus destroyed the temple of Mutinus in the Velian ward in consequence of the immoralities to which it gave rise, a dozen others soon rose to take its place. On the marriage night, statuettes of the deities Subiqus and Prema hung over the nuptial bed—ut subacta a sponso viro non se commoveat quum premitur;[130] and in the morning the jealous husband exacted, by measuring the neck of his bride, proof to his superstitious mind that she had yielded him her virginity.[131]
In the older age of the republic it was not considered decent for women to recline on couches at table as men did. This, however soon became quite common. Men and women lay together on the same couch so close that hardly room for eating was left. And this was the custom not only with women of loose morals, but with the most respectable matrons. At the feast of Trimalchio, which is the best recital of a Roman dinner we have, the wife of the host and the wife of Habinus both appeared before the guests. Habinus amused them by seizing his host’s wife by the feet and throwing her forward so that her dress flew up and exposed her knees, and Trimalchio himself did not blush to show his preference for a giton in the presence of the company, and to throw a cup at his wife’s head when her jealousy led her to remonstrate.[132] The voyage of the hero of the Satyricon furnishes other pictures of the intensely depraved feeling which pervaded Roman society. The author does not seem to admit the possibility of virtue’s existence; all his men and women are equally vicious and shameless. The open spectacle of the most hideous debauchery only provokes a laugh. If a man declines to accede to the propositions which the women are the first to make, it must be because he is a disciple of the aversa Venus, and whole cities are depicted as joining in the hue and cry after the lost frater of a noted debauchee.
The commessationes, which Cicero enumerates among the symptoms of corruption in his time, had become of universal usage. It was for them that the cooks of Rome exhausted their art in devising the dishes which have puzzled modern gastronomists; for them that the rare old wines of Italy were stowed away in cellars; for them that Egyptian and Ionian dancing-girls stripped themselves, or donned the nebula linea.[133] No English words can picture the monstrosities which are calmly narrated in the pages of Petronius and Martial. Well might Juvenal cry, “Vice has culminated.”[134]
It is perhaps difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise, considering the examples set by the emperors. It requires no small research to discover a single character in the long list that was not stained by the grossest habits. Julius Cæsar, “the bald adulterer,” was commonly said to be “husband of all men’s wives.”[135] Augustus, whose youth had been so dissolute as to suggest a most contemptuous epigram, employed men in his old age to procure matrons and maidens, whom these purveyors of imperial lust examined as though they had been horses at a public sale.[136] The amours of Tiberius in his retreat at Capreæ can not be described. It will suffice to say there was no invention of infamy which he did not patronise; that no young person of any charms was safe from his lust. More than one senator felt that safety required he should remove his handsome wife or pretty daughter from Rome, for Tiberius was ever ready to avenge obstacles with death. The sad fate of the beautiful Mallonia, who stabbed herself during a lawsuit which the emperor had instituted against her because she refused to comply with his beastly demands, gives a picture of the age.[137] Caligula, who made some changes in the tax levied on prostitutes, and established a brothel in the palace, commenced life by debauching his sisters, and ended it by giving grand dinners, during which he would remove from the room any lady he pleased, and, after spending a few minutes with her in private, return and give an account of the interview for the amusement of the company.[138] Messalina so far eclipsed Claudius in depravity that the “profuse debauches” of the former appear, by contrast, almost moderate and virtuous.[139]
Nero surpassed his predecessors in cynic recklessness. He was an habitual frequenter of houses of prostitution. He dined in public at the great circus among a crowd of prostitutes. He founded, on the shore of the Gulf of Naples, houses of prostitution, and filled them with females, whose dissolute habits were their recommendation to his notice. The brief sketch of his journeys given by Tacitus, and the allusions to his minister of pleasures, Tigellinus, leave no room for doubting that he was a monster of depravity.[140]
Passing over a coarse Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a mean Vespasian, and a dissolute Titus, Domitian revived the age of Nero. He seduced his brother’s daughter, and carried her away from her husband, bathed habitually in company with a band of prostitutes, and set an example of hideous vice while enacting severe laws against debauchery. After another interval, Commodus converted the palace into a house of prostitution. He kept in his pay three hundred girls of great beauty, and as many youths, and revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he could no longer share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he assumed the dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with the spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus, whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpassed even the most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his pride to have been able to teach even the most expert courtesans of Rome something more than they knew; his pleasure to wallow among them naked, and to pull down into the sink of bestiality in which he lived the first officers of the empire.
When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no need of inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial—and he was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian—would only laugh, and copy the model before him. It may safely be asserted that there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly depraved a state of morals as Martial’s epigram on his wife.