Life of a Male Concubine in the Roman Empire

Marriages in the ancient Roman world were a lot different to how we think of them today. A marriage then was more transactional than ones today, it was also common and almost expected for husbands to cheat on their wives, this could be a casual thing like going to a prostitute or could be a more long-term affair. These affairs were usually with women, but it was also very common for men to sleep with other men. Welcome to Crazy Histories where we bring you the craziest and weirdest facts from human history, some of the things discussed in this video may be offensive or disturbing, viewer discretion is advised. Sexuality in ancient Rome: the ancient Romans didn’t have the same view of sex or sexuality that we do today, they didn’t see someone as being homo, bi, or heterosexual, they didn’t put a label on a person. Instead of caring about who was having the sex, the Romans cared more about the power dynamic in the act of sex itself. In a heterosexual relationship, the man was the giver and the woman was the receiver,

they saw this as putting the man in the position of power since the woman was submitting to him. However, in a relationship between two men, one of the men had to be the receiver, so take on a more feminine, submissive role. One of the most common and accepted sexual relationships between two men was called pederasty, this was a relationship between an adult man called the erastes and a teenage boy called the eromenos. This wasn’t just a sexual partnership, this was also a type of mentorship, they wouldn’t have seen this type of age gap in a relationship as problematic like we would today. In fact, for members of the upper class, a pederastic relationship was a sort of rite of passage, the boy was able to make connections that weren’t just his father’s and got to be properly introduced to the senatorial class. When it came to the men in power, it was very common for them to have both male and female lovers, and neither was seen as cheating like we call it today. In a time period where contraceptives didn’t exist and childbirth was the number one cause of death for women, it was sort of a form of birth control for a man to sleep with someone other than his wife, at the very least it was a way for a man to enjoy himself without putting his spouse at risk of death. In cases of homosexual relationships, it would have been expected for the Emperor or whoever had the higher position to take the role of the giver, which was seen as the more powerful and masculine role. However, this wasn’t always the case and it always confused the Roman public when they chose to take on the submissive and what they saw as feminine role. Julius Caesar was a prime example of this, even though he was the most powerful man in the world, he enjoyed being the receiver in relationships with men, this was the most confusing thing for the Roman citizens to think about, he was the man that turned Rome into an Empire and held the most power in it, why wouldn’t he want to have the power in the bedroom too? Emperor Hadrian: while many of the Emperors had lovers of both genders, there was one that strictly took men to bed. Ruling from 117 CE, the Emperor Hadrian did not just have male lovers, but it seems that he was not interested in women at all. While he was married to a woman for political reasons, he and his wife had no children together, in fact most historians believe that the two never even consummated the marriage.

Part of the reason historians think this is because of how many lovers that both of them took and the attention that Hadrian paid to his male partners over the years. Hadrian wrote many erotic poems about his lovers, while there were many men in Hadrian’s life, there was one lover that stood above the rest, that was a beautiful teenager named Antonius. He made sure that the boy received a proper education, and afterwards the two traveled extensively together. Unfortunately, after several years together, tragedy struck while the two were traveling in Egypt, the boy drowned in the Nile under some mysterious circumstances. At the site of the death, Hadrian founded a city and named it after his lover, he then took Antonius’s mummified body with him back to Rome, where he had coins minted with the boy’s face and deified him, meaning that he commanded that Antonius be worshipped throughout the Empire as a god. Emperor Nero: Hadrian, it seems, was a bit of an oddity when it came to how he treated his lovers, in general Emperors found their lovers from the palace slaves and tended to continue to treat them like slaves. Nero was no exception to this and found at least two of his male lovers in his slaves. Unlike other Emperors though, Nero forced the men to participate in bizarre wedding ceremonies. One of these men was a freed slave named Pythagoras, in this instance Pythagoras was the groom and Nero was the bride, veiled and all.

This of course was one of the instances where the public was confused by the Emperor’s behavior, he was the ruler, the one with the power, so shouldn’t he have played the masculine role? That wasn’t the only time that Nero married a man, a few years later he married another slave boy named Sporus. This time Nero made his people happy by fitting the masculine role they expected him to take, however his actions here are much worse sounding to our modern sensibilities. To make sure that the people knew that Nero was fitting into the powerful masculine role, he had the boy castrated. There are other instances of Nero’s cruelty towards his lovers and concubines, but history has painted him in a particularly bad light and it can be hard to sift out the truth from the exaggerations. For example, one historian from his time wrote that Nero and his mother were in an incestuous relationship, this is certainly not true, but it’s the type of thing that was commonly said about him after his death. Emperor Tiberius: Tiberius was one of the worst offenders for mistreatment of his lovers, if you can really call his concubines that. He’s a prime example of an older man who liked to sleep with younger boys, so if sex acts against children is bothersome to you, you may want to stop the video now. Because of his attraction to children and the specific things he enjoyed doing with the young boys, he’s now seen as one of the most sexually depraved of the Emperors.

Most of his actions took place outside of Rome, so some of the reports are sure to be exaggerated, but many are also sure to be true. Tiberius spent much of his time in private villas on islands in the Mediterranean, he had young boys brought to the islands to be his household servants and also to satisfy his sexual desires. It wasn’t purely sex that he would demand from his young concubines though, there were a number of gross things that he would have these young boys do. One of the worst things he did was train particular young boys to swim between his legs while he bathed, he then had them nibble on his genitals under the water. Still worse, he would take newborn babies from their mothers and hold them to his erect crotch to simulate holding an infant to their mother’s breast. In addition to those terrible things, Tiberius did not just demand that the young boys sleep with him, he would also force them to sleep with each other in any number of groupings while he watched to get himself ready to perform the same acts. In general, the life of an Emperor’s male lover was not an easy one, sure there were perks to be had like spending time with the most powerful person in the world and living in their lavish quarters, but the cons really outweighed the pros though. Roman politics were often changing, so your partner may or may not be in power for much longer, besides that there were quite a few Emperors that had some truly depraved fantasies and no one could stop them from living them. Would the pros be worth it to you? Let us know down below, and then don’t forget to like and subscribe for more crazy history videos.