24/07/2020
It's History lesson time.... Dan Jones has been Walking Britain's Roman Roads for a series on the Channel Five network. Available to watch again on My5, the programme on Wednesday evening charted the Fosse Way, which ran from ancient Exeter to Lincoln. In Bath, Dan spent time visiting the ancient remains of the Roman City of Aquae-Sulis, which was already a pagan shrine long before the Romans arrived with a conquering force in the year 43 AD or CE. He learned about the pleasurable pursuits of the Baths including the fact that people would hook up at these emporia of leisure – so, no different to today's gyms then! Men and women and also samesex couples would use the bathhouses to get naked together. They could also indulge in some bodycare including massage with oils and hair removal, which historians think was conducted using heated walnut shells. The Romans did not approve of body hair on anyone, so today's preoccupation with shaving, waxing and shaping is not a modern one. Indeed, they might have pinched this aesthetic off of the even more Ancient Greek civilisation, whose homoerotic idealisation of naked and shaved young men is preserved in a multitude of statues. Which brings us to Roman conceptions of sexuality and gender. If you had a TARDIS – which of course, our resident pan dimensional or just plain demented Time Lord, Steffi The Producer has – and plonked down in the Roman Empire talking of gay, lesbian or any other identity, they would have looked on you with bewilderment. For the Romans, sex was the right and proclivity of all free men: whether it was with women, or lower status men, did not matter or define a man's identity. The Romans certainly traded with the great empires of the Indus Valley and the wider Indian subcontinent, so educated citizens of Rome would have known of the existence of gender variant identities such as Hijras. However, to date, little exploration has been conducted into the experiences of gender non conformist people in European Roman world. If you know of any exciting research, do please email us, because all the team here loves history. Of course, the Emporer Hadrian, whose benevolent reign covered the early second century, secured a lot of borders, and saw a zenith in Roman arts and culture. Hadrian's preferences were for male lovers, and his favourite, a young man called Aninous, was said to have been exceptionally beautiful. Antinous drowned in the River Nile in the year 130. The distraught Hadrian took comfort from the religion of the Egyptians, which was already thousands of years old by the time of Rome. The Egyptians believed that people who drowned in the sacred River were reborn in the image of the god Osiris. Hence, the cult of Antinous was proclaimed and celebrated throughout the Roman world. Indeed, more statues of the moody looking young man survive than of some of the Emporers themselves. The cult died out after the adoption of the new religion of Christianity in 380. But some historians believe that homosexual men continued to collect images of Antinous. In 2003, a neo-pagan group of gay and bisexual men reinstituted the cult as a modern religion and can be found online at Antinousgaygod.blogspot.com.
