The perceived servile origins of the plebs contributed to their sexual degradation by those above them. For elite men, whose households were stocked with slaves of both sexes, the boundaries of coercion and rape were blurred. “Every master has full authority to use his slave as he might wish,” said the philosopher Musonius Rufus.
In the sexuality of the Roman elite man, it mattered little if one preferred to have sex with men or women. The pleasure to be derived from each was debated in literature, and presumably in conversation. Some men tended to stick to one or the other, but many enjoyed both. ‘Homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ were not categories by which contemporaries defined themselves.
- Historyextra
