Removing all pubic hair with hot ash or sticking a spiky fish into the anus must have hurt. But that's not the worst that could have happened to an adulterer in ancient Greco-Roman times ...
“A certain man asked Socrates for advice as to whether he should marry or not. The philosopher replied:"Whichever of these two you choose, you will regret your choice," wrote the philosopher's biographer Diogenes Laertios in the 3rd century CE. With this approach, having a relationship with a woman didn't seem like much fun. And there could have been problems with the law on top of all this…
Flower to flower
Greek and Roman marriages were monogamous. For monogamy was considered more noble than polygamy, allegedly widespread only among "primitive" peoples (although polygamy also appeared in the Greek royal families - Macedonian and Ptolemaic!). In practice, monogamy also in the average Greeks did not mean loyalty to one woman. This is due to all kinds of lovers with whom the ancients had no resistance.
The ancient world was full of paradoxes. On the one hand, pederasty and prostitution, on the other - cruel punishments for treason. Pictured is the painting by Alessandro Varotari "Venus and Mars Caught by Volcano".
Cohabiting was also popular. Although the "kept woman" did not have the same rights as the wife, sometimes such a relationship was the only option. For example, when there were formal issues at stake:An Athenian had no right to marry a foreign woman. Another thing is that a man could have both a wife and a concubine! It didn't bother anyone much, as long as the women didn't live under the same roof, of course, and the partner was able to support them both .
The state encouraged entering into permanent relationships because stability favored the fertility of relationships. Trapping the wives in the four walls of the house made it even easier. The population grew, the cities had new soldiers and taxpayers (for a similar purpose the Romans tried to shape their family policy by promoting marriages with many children).
The ancient Greeks were only officially monogamous. In practice, the Athenian, apart from his wife, could have a concubine, and at the same time use the services of prostitutes and slaves. The illustration shows a painting by Angelika Kauffmann of Fryne, the most famous ancient hetta.
The aforementioned marriages and concubinages did not exhaust all the possibilities of the Greeks in terms of their sex life - they also used the services of prostitutes and slaves, many practiced pederasty. The wives could complain under their breaths, but no one cared. Described in the 3rd century BC the women of Lemnos, who, outraged by their husbands' constant association with Thracian war captives, cut them down, is just a literary fantasy.
The Greeks eagerly seized the opportunities for sex provided by prostitution and slavery. Ancient monogamy was therefore only an appearance. Only with time there were suggestions from philosophers (not only Christian) that marriage should be a relationship based on mutual support and mutual respect. And that meant mutual fidelity.
Seducer on target
For hundreds of years, however, only the wife's fidelity and the husband's right in case of betrayal were an issue. In Athens, from the time of Draco in the 7th century BCE to Demosthenes in the 4th century BC - in this case, the most severe punishment affected the adulterer-seducer. If he was caught red-handed, it was even possible to kill him (as long as without a knife!) . At that time, the murderous act was qualified as "justifiable murder." The good-natured Greek fairy tale writer Aesop made a joke in the 6th century BCE. - describing the story of the betrayal of his wife with a young man so handsome that his husband also invited him to his house, because he too felt like playing - however, the right to take the life of a seducer was indeed in force and it was often put into practice.
An example can be the case of the murder of a certain Eratosthenes, known from the writings of the Athenian orator Lysias (5th-4th century BC). The shepherd, Euliletos, accused before the court, explained that Eratosthenes had seduced his wife, led her astray, disgraced his children and insulted him. Therefore, according to the regulations in force, he had the right to take revenge.
This article was written during the author's work on the book "Ages of shamelessness. Sex and erotica in antiquity ”(CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl 2018).
He admitted that he would never suspect a wife. Rather, it was she who pointed out to him that when drunk he "took up" the maid, which he only laughed at. Unfortunately, a local seducer chose Eratosthenes' wife at a funeral. The husband was not aware of the woman's affair until he was informed about it by the "kind" ones. He prepared a trap. When one night lovers made a love nest in his own home, he found them taking a group of friends as witnesses. He reported:
We pushed the door to the room; we, who entered first, saw him on the bed next to my wife; those who came in later saw him standing naked on the bed! I hit him, husbands, and knocked him down, and pulling his hands back and tying him up, I asked why he was doing this when he entered my house. He pleaded guilty and pleaded not to kill him, but to accept the money. And I replied to him:"I will not kill you, but the law of the state, which you have violated, valuing it less than the use of pleasure, and you would rather hurt my wife and my children than obey the laws and be an honest man" .
However, Euliletos' behavior raises doubts. He did not kill the seducer in some affect, he acted methodically, he even plotted against his wife and Eratosthenes. He caught him where he wanted to; lovelas "was not taken by force from the street or from the holy house altar, where he sought refuge." Besides, Euliletos was under no obligation to kill the delinquent, he did not have to beat him tied up in his own home. Most of all, he could let him redeem himself. However, it was a gentle, somewhat ambiguous, dishonorable solution - not without reason the comedy writer Callias encouraged his husbands in the 5th century BC:“Profit is better than disgrace. Let the adulterer in the house "!
This is what a scorpionfish looks like - a predatory fish armed with spikes. The very prickle is extremely painful for a human being. Could it be that the ancients punished adulterers by putting her into the anus of a delinquent?
Between the two extremes - death and redemption - however, there were also indirect penalties. As the poet Anacreont (6th-5th century BCE) wrote, one of the delinquents had all the hair from his head and beard torn out. Publicly, hot ashes were used to remove the adulterer's pubic hair. He had a radish or even a scorpion stuffed into his anus - a spiny, poisonous fish (although some researchers doubt that it was possible:the punished could not survive such torture). It was a humiliation, a deprivation of dignity, an exclusion from public life, reducing to a role no more than a male prostitute. No wonder that in the comedy "Clouds" by Aristophanes, one of the characters speaks not of pain but of social exclusion when they "put a radish up his ass and rub it with ashes."
Under the anecdote powder
It is interesting that the most famous betrayal in Greek myths - Aphrodite and Ares who were caught in flagranti by the husband of the goddess of love Hephaestus - it ended much softer. Lovers, caught in a clever web and publicly humiliated by the Olympic gods, go away unscathed. Hephaestus is satisfied with the compensation - not even from Ares, but from the outraged over Poseidon.
On Earth, in Athens, an unfaithful wife was divorced by her husband back to her father. As a consequence, there was a divorce. But this is not the end. Adulterers were not allowed to participate in religious ceremonies, which deprived them of one of the few opportunities to leave their home. Adulteress in the family - it was a terrible shame. It is not surprising that the Athenians are joking that the first thing a husband does after returning from the theater is rummaging through the house in search of his half's lover.
The Greek story-writer Aesop told an anecdote about a woman he visited, and he made himself known by barking like a dog outside her house. Another man saw it and one evening he pushed himself to the door of the unbeliever and barked too. Meanwhile, while he was playing with her, the true lover also came. He barked as usual, but then the smart man who had replaced him started barking from inside the house. The unlucky lover had nothing to look for there:“It became clear to him that there was a bigger dog in the house. So he ran on his way back. " It is a pity that Aesop did not explain what the house burqa was doing at the time. Could he be in the theater?
But why did the ancients betray so often? What could the Athenians have complained about? For the husband's lack of readiness to fulfill his obligations as a bed? After all, according to the law established by the Athenian statesman Solon (7th-6th century BC), a spouse should make love to his wife at least three times a month! The very existence of this provision indicates that the man was in no rush to the half, with quite a lot of other options to choose from. As Xenophon wrote, the wife was the mother of the children and "business partner". And at the same time it seemed… just boring. Therefore, the question immediately arises with the Greek writer:"are there people with whom you would talk less than your wife?".
Why so much betrayal in ancient Greece? Wives not please men? Or maybe the opposite - husbands did not meet the expectations of women? Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that adultery in antiquity was common. The illustration shows the painting by Franciszek Żmurka "Heter".
Women were certainly not as stupid as the Greek politician Aeschines put it in the 4th century BC. Here is a girl from Troas, thinking about getting married, went according to tradition to the Scamander River and entered the water with the words "Scamander, accept my virginity". A certain rascal, peeping at the girls in the bushes, heard it. He put a reed wreath on his head and jumped out of the bushes. "I take you with pleasure," he said, "I'll do my best to do you a lot of good." Then he kidnapped the girl and stripped her of her virginity.
She actually mistook him for a water deity and gave herself to him. Evil, of course, left her, but unfortunately he was unlucky. Four days later, during a procession in the street, he came across the same girl, and she boasted to her guardian that it was the Scamander to whom she had devoted her virtue. There was a scream in the city, and the crowd went to the house of the seducer to burn the delinquent alive ...
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