
These days, we’d call someone on the receiving side of gay sex a “bottom,” but ancient Rome had a whole host of words for that role, as social media users recently discovered.
A viral tweet included a screenshot of Wikipedia’s “Homosexuality in ancient Rome” article—specifically Amy Richlin’s research into sexual roles among Roman men.
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As reported by Richlin, a professor in UCLA’s Department of Classics, the term “homosexuality” has no corresponding Latin word, and Romans did not distinguish same-sex sexual encounters from different-sex ones. But the term cinaedus is one of the words used by Romans to describe men who liked to be penetrated by other men, and it’s “just one of a large number of insulting terms used by non-cineaedi,” she added.
Richlin went on:
Here are some of the other names by which Romans called a sexually penetrated male: pathieus, exoletus, concubinus, spintria, puer (“boy”), pullus (“chick”), pusio, delicatus, mollis(“soft”), tener (“dainty”), debilis (“weak”), ejfeminatus, discinctus (“loose-belted”), morbosus(“sick”).
(In an aside, Richlin wrote, “Note how difficult it is to come up with a self-claiming name to translate cinaedus and its synonyms; ‘gay’ is not exact, ‘penetrated’ is not self-defined, ‘passive’ misleadingly connotes inaction.”)
On Twitter, people latched onto the term morbosus.
“I think we should start calling them ‘morbs’ instead of ‘twinks,’” one person wrote.
“‘It’s morbin’ time’ takes on new meaning,” said another, citing a meme about the movie Morbius.
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And in a Reddit discussion about those terms on the r/gay subreddit, one self-identified classicist confirmed that those terms “were slurs rather than identifiers.”
Another commenter wrote, “Damn, I vaguely remember learning Latin basics in high school, and now, with this post, my Latin knowledge is, like, 50% gay slurs.”
But a third Reddit user had a different take: “IDK, I’m kind of vibing with puer delicatus.”
While you’re here, check out the trailer for Colosseum, the unintentionally homoerotic, eight-part docuseries that ran last year on HISTORY.
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abfab
Modern Rome. Men on first class trains really love having sex in their compartments. Esp on the line that goes to Sicily. I know.
bachy
You certainly get around, baby! Quello Internazionale!
Redmon17
Didn’t know one could get to Sicily by train. Just learned the train uses a ferry. Pun intended.
ShaverC
Not something to brag about.
Kangol2
ShaverC, your anti-sex prudery never fails to leap out from your comments.
bachy
I’m pretty sure that being a male who fought in a war was required for Roman citizenship. If you were not a male warrior/citizen, then you were either a woman, a peasant or a slave. You were not self-defined, but rather defined by the male warrior/citizens. It would be similar to your identity being defined today by privileged straight white males.
UlfRaynor
You’re only partially correct. Service in the Legion was a guarantee of citizenship, but if your father was a Roman citizen, you automatically became a Roman citizen at the age of manhood (fifteen)
What most people don’t know, is that it was illegal for a man to be married in the Legion from the rank of Centurion down to foot soldier., and while they did sort of look down their noses at bottoms, it didn’t stop those men from achieving high rank and social status. Julius Caesar was often taunted as the queen of Bithynia because of a rumored relationship he had with King Nicomedes.
The reality was, while the Romans didn’t have a word for homosexual they did have a terminology: born eunuch, which was defined as a man born without a desire for women. A rather apt description.
I can’t help but note that Amy left out Coaptandas, which was a legal pairing of two males together (mostly soldiers) and usually granted by either the emperor or the Roman senate. It afforded the two males the same rights as a marriage.
bachy
Thanks for detailing. I just finished re-reading Mary Renault and am kinda enthralled by the dynamics of the period.
james7
When men have sex with other men, there are so many variations of who does what to whom that the terms “top” or “bottom” are really limiting. When new guys ask me if I’m a top or a bottom I say: I”m a all over.:” One of the really neat thing about being gay is one can be different things to different people or various roles without apology.
Consider This
james7 – very well stated and quite true!
Robert Bradley
Perfectly stated!
Brian
Yeah, this labeling has always seemed strange to me. I think of “top” and “bottom” as verbs, not nouns. A person can choose “to” top, instead of saying as if it’s an identity, I am “a” top.
inbama
Traditional Mediterranean Sex made simple: If you’re on top and don’t kiss, you’re not gay.
abfab
Whatever you say, Dr Ruth……
abfab
Or you’re a bitter bottom with bad breath…….
inbama
Bitter? Hardly.
Why do you think think E. M. Forster and all those British writers wrote about women and gays vacationing in Italy, Greece and even Morocco (before Islamists ruined everything)? They had a distinctively different understanding of human sexuality, and they didn’t have Britain’s sodomy laws.
You can see this kind of thinking in the scene with the soldiers in Julian Schnabel’s 2000 film “Before Night Falls” starring Javier Bardem. Or in the “down low.”
Not my way of thinking as a Stonewall Generation American who also likes sanitation and indoor plumbing.
Fahd
A friend tells me that in Spain lots of guys describe themselves as “morboso” in their personal ads. I think it is meant as sexually attractive, rather than morbid, and I don’t think it has any connotations about preferred sexual positions.
bachy
Morboso means horny, kinky or even a little perverse. Not looking for “romance” but rather a desire to get a little down & dirty.
crazyoldman
I find it interesting that most of the words have the masculine ending “us”. I thought they might feminize them. But never thought of it before. Things have changed since I studied latin over 50 years ago.
Nixter
Thanks for that fascinating bit. Jesus also referred to “born eunuchs” as referrring to men uninterested in (hetero) marriage, not just celibacy I think. I wonder if He meant us homos? A good website detailing the history of the term eunuch called Born Eunuchs.