Its not uncommon to see the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire as, among other things, the triumph of sexual repression over a more swinging pagan culture. But reviewing Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, Peter Brown complicates this narrative with a troubling fact about just who was having all that sex:
So do we blame the Christians for bringing down the curtain on those merry scenes? Yes, but against a background that comes as a chill reminder of the lasting strangeness of the ancient
world. If one asks if women in these scenes were free persons (and even how many of the men were free, for some might be slave gigolos), the unexpected answer would be: far fewer than we would wish to think. Many of the women were slaves. The jolly free-for-all, which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel “zone of free access” provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, “an inherently degrading institution,” was “absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.” …
What mattered, in Roman law and in Roman sexual morality, had little to do with sex. It had everything to do with whose bodies could be enjoyed with impunity and whose could not be touched without elaborate formulas of consent.
(Image of a Roman mural via Wikimedia Commons)
