The ancient Romans viewed sex and sexual morality differently that the Europeans who unearthed their remains and differently than we do today. Some of their idea seem odd to us, and some of our ideas would seem absolutely outrageous to them. During the last couple hundred years there has been a push to regulate things deemed obscene in an attempt to prevent people from looking at certain objectionable material. This is done because of the assumption that people can’t regulate the feelings they get from those images. I cannot imagine why “feelings” are a problem, but I guess for some people just the thought of pornographic material leads them to worry about what? People having sex? Perhaps the wrong people having sex? Or maybe even people having sex the wrong way? Oh the horror of it all! The Romans were not concerned with what people looked at, and in fact most of what we deem obscene was typical ordinary artwork to them. Their painting on the wall of a couple having sex is comparable to the landscape or still life on a modern living room wall. Besides, sexual urges In ancient world were a problem of self control and they expected people to be able to control themselves. Far more concerning to the Romans was the importance of regulating class and station. While there were no regulations regarding explicit artwork, there were some very strict social controls on sexual behavior, but those controls were different than ours today. For example, sexual acts out in the open were not really a problem. but who was doing what to whom was. There was a definitive distinction between male citizens and non-citizens. Male citizens were always penetrating others, both male and female and they were never penetrated by another male citizen. There was also a relatively clear delineation between wives, courtesans, prostitutes and slaves. Wives were for babies, courtesans and prostitutes for sexual needs and slaves were basically seen as objects or toys. It seems unthinkable for us today but interactions between a master and a slave, especially a sexual slave, were very much akin to that of an owner and a material possession. For example a man who is planning an intimate evening with his wife, might decide to pull out a toy to play with to get aroused and to ready himself. The toy, of course being one of his slaves. He might additionally choose to enhance the marital encounter by bringing along said toy. Roman citizens also relied very much on their ability to speak and debate. This led to a bit of a fixation on the purity of the mouth. The mouth was the organ of speech and was directly related to oratory and how you communicated in the political realm. So, it was of the utmost importance to prevent it from being denigrated in any way. Blowjobs were reserved for prostitutes and a man going down on a woman was seen as the woman penetrating the man’s mouth and was considered very degrading to the man. That kind of debauchery, if anyone dared engage in it, would have likely occured behind closed doors in a brothel. If you look at this explicit art through the ancient Roman lens, you will see a good bit of appropriate sexual behavior but you will also see a lot of forbidden, taboo situations. Depictions of these more forbidden acts would likely elicit jokes or laughter from those who saw them. Sometimes, this might have actually been the reason for their presence, to change the mood of the room. Some have suggested that this might have been the case with some artwork in one of the bath houses in Pompeii. Continued in The Bath House and the Evil Eye