Читать книгу The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World - William W. Sanger - Страница 11

When her marriage approached the remains of her modesty were effectually destroyed. Before marriage she was led to the statue of Mutinus, a nude sitting figure, and made to sit on his knee,[129] ut ejus pudicitiam prius deus delibasse videtur. This usage was so deeply rooted among the Romans that, when Augustus destroyed the temple of Mutinus in the Velian ward in consequence of the immoralities to which it gave rise, a dozen others soon rose to take its place. On the marriage night, statuettes of the deities Subiqus and Prema hung over the nuptial bed—ut subacta a sponso viro non se commoveat quum premitur;[130] and in the morning the jealous husband exacted, by measuring the neck of his bride, proof to his superstitious mind that she had yielded him her virginity.[131]

In the older age of the republic it was not considered decent for women to recline on couches at table as men did. This, however soon became quite common. Men and women lay together on the same couch so close that hardly room for eating was left. And this was the custom not only with women of loose morals, but with the most respectable matrons. At the feast of Trimalchio, which is the best recital of a Roman dinner we have, the wife of the host and the wife of Habinus both appeared before the guests. Habinus amused them by seizing his host’s wife by the feet and throwing her forward so that her dress flew up and exposed her knees, and Trimalchio himself did not blush to show his preference for a giton in the presence of the company, and to throw a cup at his wife’s head when her jealousy led her to remonstrate.[132] The voyage of the hero of the Satyricon furnishes other pictures of the intensely depraved feeling which pervaded Roman society. The author does not seem to admit the possibility of virtue’s existence; all his men and women are equally vicious and shameless. The open spectacle of the most hideous debauchery only provokes a laugh. If a man declines to accede to the propositions which the women are the first to make, it must be because he is a disciple of the aversa Venus, and whole cities are depicted as joining in the hue and cry after the lost frater of a noted debauchee.

The commessationes, which Cicero enumerates among the symptoms of corruption in his time, had become of universal usage. It was for them that the cooks of Rome exhausted their art in devising the dishes which have puzzled modern gastronomists; for them that the rare old wines of Italy were stowed away in cellars; for them that Egyptian and Ionian dancing-girls stripped themselves, or donned the nebula linea.[133] No English words can picture the monstrosities which are calmly narrated in the pages of Petronius and Martial. Well might Juvenal cry, “Vice has culminated.”[134]

It is perhaps difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise, considering the examples set by the emperors. It requires no small research to discover a single character in the long list that was not stained by the grossest habits. Julius Cæsar, “the bald adulterer,” was commonly said to be “husband of all men’s wives.”[135] Augustus, whose youth had been so dissolute as to suggest a most contemptuous epigram, employed men in his old age to procure matrons and maidens, whom these purveyors of imperial lust examined as though they had been horses at a public sale.[136] The amours of Tiberius in his retreat at Capreæ can not be described. It will suffice to say there was no invention of infamy which he did not patronise; that no young person of any charms was safe from his lust. More than one senator felt that safety required he should remove his handsome wife or pretty daughter from Rome, for Tiberius was ever ready to avenge obstacles with death. The sad fate of the beautiful Mallonia, who stabbed herself during a lawsuit which the emperor had instituted against her because she refused to comply with his beastly demands, gives a picture of the age.[137] Caligula, who made some changes in the tax levied on prostitutes, and established a brothel in the palace, commenced life by debauching his sisters, and ended it by giving grand dinners, during which he would remove from the room any lady he pleased, and, after spending a few minutes with her in private, return and give an account of the interview for the amusement of the company.[138] Messalina so far eclipsed Claudius in depravity that the “profuse debauches” of the former appear, by contrast, almost moderate and virtuous.[139]

Nero surpassed his predecessors in cynic recklessness. He was an habitual frequenter of houses of prostitution. He dined in public at the great circus among a crowd of prostitutes. He founded, on the shore of the Gulf of Naples, houses of prostitution, and filled them with females, whose dissolute habits were their recommendation to his notice. The brief sketch of his journeys given by Tacitus, and the allusions to his minister of pleasures, Tigellinus, leave no room for doubting that he was a monster of depravity.[140]

Passing over a coarse Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a mean Vespasian, and a dissolute Titus, Domitian revived the age of Nero. He seduced his brother’s daughter, and carried her away from her husband, bathed habitually in company with a band of prostitutes, and set an example of hideous vice while enacting severe laws against debauchery. After another interval, Commodus converted the palace into a house of prostitution. He kept in his pay three hundred girls of great beauty, and as many youths, and revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he could no longer share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he assumed the dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with the spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus, whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpassed even the most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his pride to have been able to teach even the most expert courtesans of Rome something more than they knew; his pleasure to wallow among them naked, and to pull down into the sink of bestiality in which he lived the first officers of the empire.

When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no need of inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial—and he was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian—would only laugh, and copy the model before him. It may safely be asserted that there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly depraved a state of morals as Martial’s epigram on his wife.

SECRET DISEASES AT ROME.

At what period, and where, venereal diseases first made their appearance, is a matter of doubt. It was long the opinion of the faculty that they were of modern origin, and that Europe had derived them from America, where the sailors of Columbus had first contracted them. This opinion does not appear to rest on any solid basis, and is now generally rejected. The fact is, that the venereal disease prevailed extensively in Europe in the fifteenth century; but the presumption, from an imposing mass of circumstantial evidence, is that it has afflicted humanity from the beginning of history.

Still, it is strange that Greek and Latin authors do not mention it. There is a passage in Juvenal in which allusion is made to a disgusting disease, which appears to bear resemblance to venereal disease. Epigrams of Martial hint at something of the same kind. Celsus describes several diseases of the generative organs, but none of these authors ascribe the diseases they mention to venereal intercourse.

Celsus prefaces what he says on the subject of this class of maladies with an apology. Nothing but a sense of duty has led him to allude to matters so delicate; but he feels that he ought not to allow his country to lose the benefit of his experience, and he conceives it to be “desirable to disseminate among the people some medical principles with regard to a class of diseases which are never revealed to any one.”

After this apology, he proceeds to speak of a disease which he calls inflammatio colis, which seems to have borne a striking analogy to the modern Phymosis. It has been supposed that the Elephantiasis, which he describes at length, was also of a syphilitic character; and the symptoms detailed by Aretous, who wrote in the latter half of the first century, certainly remind the reader of secondary syphilis; but the best opinion of to-day appears to be that the diseases are distinct and unconnected.

Women afflicted with secret diseases were called aucunnuentæ, which explains itself. They prayed to Juno Fluonia for relief, and used the aster atticus by way of medicine. The Greek term for this herb being Bonbornion, which the Romans converted into Bubonium, that word came to be applied to the disease for which it was given, whether in the case of females or males. Modern science has obtained thence the term Bubo. The Romans said of a female who communicated a disease to a man, Hæc te imbubinat.[141]

We find, moreover, in the later writers, allusions to the morbus campanus, the clazomenæ, the rubigo, etc., which were all secret diseases of a type, if not syphilitic, strongly resembling it. It must be admitted, however, that no passage in the ancient writers directly ascribes these diseases to commerce with prostitutes.

Roman doctors declined to treat secret diseases. They were called by the generic term morbus indecens, and it was considered unbecoming to confess to them or to treat them. Rich men owned a slave doctor who was in the confidence of the family, and to whom such delicate secrets would naturally be confided. But the mass of the people were restrained by shame from communicating their misfortunes; as was the case among the Jews, the unhappy patient was driven to seclusion as the only remedy. However cruel and senseless this practice may have been as regarded the sufferer, it was of service to the people, as it prevented, in some degree, the spread of contagion.

Up to the period of the civil wars, and perhaps as late as the Christian era, the only physicians at Rome were drug-sellers, enchanters, and midwives. The standing of the former may be inferred from a passage in Horace, where he classes them with the lowest outcasts of Roman society.[142] The enchanters (sagæ) made philtres to produce or impede the sensual appetite. They were execrated, and even so amorous a poet as Ovid felt bound to warn young girls against the evil effects of the aphrodisiacs they concocted.[143] Midwives also made philtres, and are often confounded with the sagæ. The healing science of the three classes must have been small.

About the reign of Augustus, Greek physicians began to settle at Rome. They possessed much theory, and some practical experience, as the Treatise of Celsus shows, and soon became an important class in Roman society. It was not, however, till the reign of Nero, that an office of public physician was created. Under that emperor, a Greek named Andromachus was appointed archiater, or court physician, and archiatii populares were soon afterward appointed for the people. They were allowed to receive money from the rich, but they were bound, in consideration of various privileges bestowed on their office, to treat the poor gratuitously. They were stationed in every city in the empire. Rome had fourteen, besides those attached to the Vestals, the Gymnasia, and the court; other large cities had ten, and so on, down to the small towns which had one or two.[144] From the duties and privileges of the archiatii, it would appear they were subject to the ædiles.

It may seem almost superfluous to add that no careful medical reader of the history of Rome under the empire can doubt but the archiatii filled no sinecure, and that a large proportion of the diseases they treated were directly traceable to prostitution.