This is the kind of shit I was talking about yesterday. The Roman world wasn't this idyllic landscape of free, lauded male-male love that we can criticize our modern culture over. The way we treat homosexuality in the modern western world in 2020 is *by far* the superior mode.

The first point to make is that "Gay" or "Homosexual" are ahistoric terms to use. They didn't exist until well into the modern period. Romans wouldn't have seen, described, or identified someone else or themselves as "gay" or "a homosexual".

Instead, what we today would call a homosexual act tied into the ways in n which Romans performed masculinity. A masculine Roman man was a very anxious, fragile thing; constantly trying to preserve his civic and sexual integrity.

In the context of sex what was lauded was two things. First, sexual temperance; hypersexuality was one of the worst accusations you could make of someone. The second was tied to status; it was encouraged for Roman men to engage in *active* sex acts, not *passive* ones.

So it was totally acceptable to have active, dominant sex with other men. The stereotype is of an upperclass Roman man having penetrative sex with a younger boy, slave, or servant. Receptive sex acts of the same were shameful. They were obsessed with sexual dominance to a degree.

This cut both ways regardless of gender; it was accepted to be the active sex partner with a woman, to dominate a woman, but it was intensely shameful for a man to give oral sex to a woman because to a Roman mind you were "submitting" to a woman. Scandalous!