SEXUAL MORALITY IN ANCIENT ROME

(Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 88.8)
Sexual behaviour was a central ethical concern of Roman authors, whatever
Foucault may have suggested.
The ethical problems of sex are treated at
length, for instance, by two (rather different) didactic works of the late
Republic, Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Virgil’s Georgics, both of which
depict amor as a wild and destructive force.
For the early imperial moralist
ValeriusMaximus, libido (or lust) is one of themost dangerous vices, and he
devotes one of his longest chapters (6.1)to the subject of sexual crime and
sexual virtue (pudicitia).
Granted there was no Latin term corresponding
to the English word ‘sexual’: a cluster of terms such as venus, amor, voluptas,
with their own semantic ramifications, referred to the phenomenon of sex.
Neither was there a Latin word to convey our abstract notion of ‘morality’,
although this English term is derived from the Latin mores which signifies
both behaviour and codes of behaviour – custom or convention and then
more generally ways of behaving, moral conduct, morality.