We all know that modern people didn’t invent sex. Consequently, some people have wondered how many sexual partners it was common for people in ancient and medieval times to have within their lifetimes.
This is a hard question to answer because the number of sexual partners that a person in ancient or medieval times had within their lifetime depended on a wide array of factors, which include the person’s personality, gender, and economic status, as well as the time and place in which the person happened to live.
Furthermore, we don’t really have enough data to say exactly what the “average” number of sexual partners for a person in the pre-modern world was. Most of our surviving evidence comes from sources written by social elites. This makes it even harder to know exactly how many sexual partners it was common for ordinary people to have.
Because there is such drastic variance across cultures, for this article, I will be focusing on what we know about the number of sexual partners people in ancient Greece could be expected to have. Many of the things I am about to say, though, can be applied in a general sense to other ancient cultures as well.
Personality
Personality is probably the most important factor here by far. In the same way that people with different personalities have different levels of interest in having sexual partners today, the same thing was true in antiquity. There were some men in ancient times who would have sex with a different person every night if possible.
There was, for instance, the notoriously promiscuous Athenian aristocrat and politician Alkibiades (lived c. 450 – 404 BC), who was known for having sex with everyone, including both men and women. The third century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios records a saying from the philosopher Bion in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 4.47 that, when Alkibiades was a youth, he led husbands away from their wives, but, when he was a mature man, he led wives away from their husbands.
On the other hand, there were plenty of men simply weren’t interested in having sex at all. The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC), who came from a very wealthy aristocratic family, is famously reported to have never married, never had any children, and to have not been interested in sex. (Indeed, it is from Plato’s name that we get our English word platonic.)
The hedonist philosopher Epikouros of Samos (lived 341 – 270 BC) outright disdained sexuality altogether. He taught that, while sex may feel good in the moment, it can never truly make a person happy and, in fact, it can sometimes even be harmful to a person’s wellbeing. Diogenes Laërtios quotes Epikouros in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 10.118 as having written:
“’συνουσίαν’ ὀνῆσαι μὲν οὐδέποτε, ἀγαπητὸν δὲ εἰ μὴ καὶ ἔβλαψε.”
This means, in my own translation:
“No one has ever benefited from sexual intercourse, and a man should consider himself fortunate if it has not done him actual harm.”
We don’t have as much information about how different women in the ancient world thought about sex, but it is clear from what information we do have that there were just as varied opinions among women as there were among men. There were certainly some women who upheld traditional ideas of female virtue and never had extramarital affairs, while there were other women who had affairs whenever possible.
Ultimately, different people in the ancient world all had different thoughts and different desires, so we should refrain from making overly broad generalizations.
ABOVE: Socrates Dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure, painted in 1791 by the French Neoclassical painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault
Gender
After personality, gender is the most important factor to consider. Men in the pre-modern world were generally expected to have as many sexual partners as they wanted. It was generally assumed that, by the time he married, a man would have already had sex. Likewise, it was generally acceptable for married men in the ancient world to have sex as often as he wanted with prostitutes and slaves, although it was considered wrong for him to have sex with a respectable free woman, especially if she was another man’s wife.
Respectable women in the pre-modern world, on the other hand, were expected to remain virgins until marriage, after which point they were expected to only have sex with their husbands. If a married woman had sex with any man who was not her husband, she could be severely punished or even put to death.
The discrepancy between how men were expected to behave and how women were expected to behave is perhaps made most overt in the Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem written in around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. In the poem, the hero Odysseus, who is married, spends years living on islands with women like the sorceress Kirke and the nymphe Kalypso and having sex with them.
Meanwhile, Odysseus’s wife Penelope remains at home on the island of Ithake, besieged by suitors demanding her hand in marriage. Penelope is unrealistically expected to remain absolutely celibate and to wait patiently for her husband, who has been gone for twenty years and is widely believed to be dead, to come home.
When Odysseus finally comes home to Ithake after having been away from home for two whole decades, he tests Penelope to make sure she has remained faithful to him through all the years—hardly a realistic standard, considering that he himself did not remain faithful to her.
The absurd double standard for men and women is so apparent in the Odyssey that, for a moment, one almost wonders if the poet was intentionally trying to point it out and emphasize how ridiculous it was that men were allowed to cheat on their wives as much as they wanted, but wives were expected to remain absolutely loyal to their husbands.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix painted by Onesimos dated to c. 490 BC depicting a hetaira, or prostitute, retying her himation after having sex with her client. It was common and accepted for men in antiquity to have sex with prostitutes.
There are a number of reasons why this double standard existed. One reason is because, as I discuss in this article from June 2019, there was a belief that was quite pervasive throughout the ancient world and throughout most of ancient Greece in particular which held that women were not fully human in the same way that men were believed to be human. Instead, women were often thought of as creatures of an entirely different species, superior to animals, but inferior to men.
Additionally, men in the ancient world were deeply paranoid about the idea of cuckolding—another man impregnating his wife without him knowing and him raising the foreign offspring as though they were his own. Euripides’s Fragment 1015 reads:
“ἀεὶ δὲ μήτηρ φιλότεκνος μᾶλλον πατρός·
ἡ μὲν γὰρ αὑτῆς οἶδεν ὄνθ᾿, ὁ δ᾿ οἴεται.”
This means, in my own translation:
“And a mother always loves her children more than a father,
since she knows they are hers, while he only thinks they are.”
The double standard of men being allowed to have sex with as many people as they wanted while women were expected to remain absolutely faithful went mostly unquestioned throughout antiquity. In late antiquity, though, it came under attack by Christians, who insisted that men should be held to the same moral standards as women. In particular, the Christian Church Father Ioannis Chrysostomos (lived c. 349 – 407 AD) pointed this out in his Homily 5 on 1 Thessalonians 4, exclaiming, “But it’s the same crime for both!”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure pyxis dated to between c. 440 and c. 430 BC depicting a wedding procession. Respectable women in the ancient world were expected to remain virgins until marriage and, after marriage, only have sex with their husbands.
Economic status
Wealth is another important factor to consider. In the ancient world, wealth and social status were two different things. A person was considered “high status” if they were from an aristocratic family that had been wealthy for generations and was known in the community for being wealthy and important. There were a lot of people, though, who were not of aristocratic upbringing who still managed to become quite wealthy. These people were not considered to be of high status, but they did possess considerable wealth.
Wealthy men could afford to own female slaves, whom they could force to have sex with them. It was probably quite common for wealthy men in the ancient world to keep young, attractive women as slaves so they could have sex with them. Indeed, the Iliad, the earliest surviving work of Greek literature, begins with a dispute between Achilleus and Agamemnon over the ownership of the slave girls Briseïs and Chryseïs, who are clearly described as being used for sex.
Wealthy men could also afford to hire expensive prostitutes. Poorer men, on the other hand, generally had less access to slaves and prostitutes. Many poor men couldn’t afford to own slaves at all. Similarly, men who were poor generally could only afford to hire the cheapest of prostitutes.
ABOVE: First-century AD Roman fresco from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii depicting Achilleus surrendering his slave girl Briseïs to Agamemnon. It was probably common for wealthy men in the ancient world to keep attractive young women as slaves so they could rape them.
Wealth is also significant when considering the sex lives of ancient women. Women with wealthy husbands had the ability to force their husbands’ male slaves to have sex with them if they wanted. This behavior was certainly widely regarded as abhorrent and, if a woman was caught having sex with a slave, both her and the slave could potentially be put to death. Consequently, it was probably fairly uncommon for mistresses to force male slaves to have sex with them, but this almost certainly did happen at least sometimes nonetheless.
There is a rather famous legend from The Life of Aisopos (Vita W) 75–76 about Aisopos’s master’s wife ordering him to have sex with her. In the story, the whole scenario is portrayed as humorous and Aisopos is portrayed as getting great enjoyment out of it, but it is important to remember that women ordering slaves to have sex with them was probably a very real occurrence and, in many cases, the slave probably didn’t want to have sex with the master’s wife.
On the other hand, it is also important to consider that wealthy women in ancient Greece were often far more restricted in their movements than poorer women because wealthy women had slaves who could go out and do errands for them; whereas poorer women had to go out and do things themselves. Consequently, poorer women often actually had more freedom to conduct business outside the home and would have had more opportunities to engage in adulterous affairs.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaster cast from the Pushkin Museum of an ancient sculpture in the Villa Albani believed to be a fictional representation of the legendary fabulist Aisopos
Time and place
When and where a person lived could also drastically impact the number of sexual partners they had within their lifetime. For instance, poorer people who lived in rural areas probably had a lot fewer sexual partners than people who lived in cities, since there were a lot fewer people around for them to have sex with.
Ideas and values pertaining to sexuality also changed significantly over time as well. For instance, as I observe in this article I published in June 2019, in early Greek sources from the Archaic and Classical Periods, such as the poems of Sappho, the Louvre Partheneion by Alkman of Sparta, and Plato’s dialogue The Symposion, homosexual activities between women seem to be portrayed as fairly normal and accepted.
In later sources from the Roman period, though, such as Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Martial’s Epigrams, and Pseudo-Loukianos’s Erotes, homosexual acts between women are portrayed as unnatural, depraved, and even ridiculous. It is hard to know what to make of this discrepancy, but it is quite possible that it is due at least in part to a shift in attitudes over time.
ABOVE: Depiction of Sappho playing her lyre from an Attic red-figure kalathos from Akragas, dating to c. 470 BC or thereabouts. Sappho’s poems treat homosexual activities between women as acceptable; whereas later sources from the Roman period portray such activities as unnatural and deplorable.
