Re: Soldiers weren't allowed to keep slaves

"There simply weren't any, except in the hands of Centurian" Well, but it's a centurion that we're talking about, right? Are you saying, then, that it was within the realms of possibility that the Gospel centurion was in fact sleeping with his paidos? Fascinating, what you say about the permutations of the Roman army. My brother was keen on Roman military history when he was young, and my family got dragged around to various British military sites. Wish I'd had you along as a commentator. :) I trust that you and Adam Selene are having fruitful discussions on the history of the military? "His memoirs are dreary, cumbersome reading" Another of my incentives to learn Latin is the comic book version of the Gallic Wars that I picked up several years ago (see the link below). "One can't quite ascertain whether he was more outraged by the fact that the young man was a performer or that he was a slave. But obviously some sort of opprobrium existed if Cato thought the rumor would have been damaging to Sulla's career." Have you read Catherine Edwards's article, "Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome"? It's in Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, and Edwards's argument is that actors, gladiators, and prostitutes were considered moral equivalents of each other, and were all associated with transgressive sexual behavior. "Anyone reading much of the primary sources from the Republic runs across a lot of anti-homosexual sentiment - the only real question is just when did the changes in attitude become common - when did Hellenization finally take root in the sexual mores?" My research right now is on late antiquity - can you provide any thoughts on that? All the sources I'm running across act as though the pagans stopped talking about homosexuality in about 100 A.D., leaving the Christians to natter on amongst themselves for the next millennium or so, and I know that's not true. What I'm interested in knowing is whether the pro-homosexuality pagans directly attacked the arguments of the Christians, and what the general attitude was toward homosexuality at the time of the fall of Rome. I mean, the infamous Byzantine law against homosexuality wasn't passed until the beginning of the next century, and new laws generally imply that old laws aren't being adhered to, so I'm wondering whether homosexuality was still common at that time, or whether it had already gone completely underground. And if it was common enough to be acceptable to write about, what sort of arguments were being put forward to support it? Were they different arguments than in previous periods? Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]