Ancient Greek and Latin Insult Poetry

The ancient Greeks and Romans are known for their many revered works of literature, art, and philosophy. One thing they are not known for (but perhaps should be!) is their insult poetry. In this post, I have collected some insulting ancient Greek and Roman poetic passages from a wide variety of sources, including the Homeric epics, Sappho, Hipponax, Catullus, and Martial, that I find especially amusing or revealing about ancient Greek and/or Roman society.

Readers should be aware that many of the passages I am about to discuss are extremely misogynistic, classist, racist, and/or shockingly sexually obscene. Some passages contain references to sexual violence. Some readers may find some of these poems disturbing.

A short preface about ancient Greek and Roman cultures

Ancient Greek and Roman societies were very different from all societies that exist today in the twenty-first-century west. I therefore feel that, before I dive in, I should give a very condensed, extremely generalized introduction to help those who are less familiar with these ancient cultures to understand the insults I am about to discuss.

First of all, ancient Greek and Roman societies were extremely patriarchal and classist. To generalize very broadly, ancient Greek and Roman cultural norms held that a free, adult, gender-conforming, physically intact man was the only proper, complete human being. They generally held that enslaved people, women, children, gender-nonconforming men, and eunuchs were inherently inferior, deficient, incomplete, and naturally suited for submission and obedience.

Meanwhile, free adult men were expected to continually prove their masculine superiority through participation in various activities that Greek and Roman societies normatively viewed as masculine. The relative importance of specific activities varied considerably across different locales and time periods, but, throughout much of ancient history, the most important way that a man was supposed to prove his masculinity was by fighting bravely in battle, holding his ground, and killing as many enemies as possible.

Greek and Roman norms held that a man who showed extraordinary courage in battle and extraordinary martial prowess against the enemies would be remembered in stories and songs long after he died and would attain what the Greeks called κλέος ἄφθιτον (kléos áphthiton), which means “undying renown” or “undying fame.” By sharp contrast, in all periods, a man who fled from battle was typically viewed as a coward, a worthless embarrassment to his city or country, and effectively no better than a woman.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to between c. 500 and c. 475 BCE, depicting a Greek hoplite wearing his armor, holding his spear and his shield, with his helmet resting beside him

Another activity through which men were expected to prove their masculine superiority was sex. As I have previously discussed in several blog posts, including this one I made in July 2021 about ancient Roman masturbation, this one I made in September 2021 about ancient kink, and this one I made in January 2022 about taboo sex more generally in ancient Greece and Rome, unlike most people today in the twenty-first-century west, the ancient Greeks and Romans generally did not think about sexuality primarily in terms of the gender of a person’s sexual partners; instead, they thought about it primarily in terms of the role that a person took during sex.

The Greeks and Romans normatively regarded sex as an activity in which a free, adult, gender-conforming, reproductively intact man was supposed to prove his masculine superiority over a woman, enslaved person of any gender, or inferior person more generally by sexually penetrating them with his penis in any of their various orifices.

They regarded the act of sexually penetrating another person as masculine, glorious, and superior and the act of being sexually penetrated by someone else as feminine, shameful, inferior, and disgusting. Thus, men who were thought to enjoy being sexually penetrated were regarded as ridiculous, effeminate perverts who deserved to suffer the worst kinds of shame and mockery imaginable.

Some of the most insulting epithets in the entire ancient Greek and Latin languages specifically denote a man who allows other men to sexually penetrate him. These includes terms like κίναιδος (kínaidos), βάταλος (bátalos), εὐρύπρωκτος (eurýprōktos), and μαλακός (malakós) in Greek and cinaedus, pathicus, and mollis in Latin, all of which imply a man who takes effeminate glee in being sexually penetrated.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to between c. 510 and c. 500 BCE depicting a man about to sexually penetrate a woman who is lying prone on the bed beneath him

At the same time, ancient Greek and Roman societies normatively placed an extremely high degree of importance on a trait that the Greeks called σωφροσύνη (sōphrosýnē) and the Romans called temperantia. Both of these words can be loosely translated into English as “moderation” or “self-restraint.” This was an absolutely integral part of the ancient Greek and Roman normative concept of manliness and every Greek or Roman man was normatively expected to display it in his everyday actions.

Greek and Roman norms held that indulgence in food, wine, sleep, sex, and other bodily or sensual pleasures was only good or acceptable if a person did it in moderation (i.e., to an appropriate extent). If people judged that a person was indulging in sensual or bodily pleasures to an excessive degree, then they would regard that person as lacking moderation and self-control, which most people considered a very serious character flaw. (Individual opinions, of course, varied drastically about how much indulgence in sensual pleasures was acceptable and how much was excessive.)

Predictably, the Greeks and Romans usually regarded moderation as a virtue that was more natural and more common for free, adult, gender-conforming, physically intact men than for enslaved people, women, children, eunuchs, etc. As a result of this, if an enslaved person, woman, child, or eunuch failed to display moderation, then it was seen as to some degree natural and expected, given their (supposedly) inferior nature. If, on the other hand, a free adult man, especially a man of high status or in a position of authority, failed to display moderation, then his conduct was regarded as all the more disgraceful.

ABOVE: Temperantia, painted in 1872 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones

Achilleus’s tirade against Agamemnon in the Iliad 1.225–232

With that little preface out of the way, let’s move on to our first insult.

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter that is the product of oral tradition and most likely became fixed in something resembling its present form in around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE or thereabouts. It is one of the earliest and famous surviving works of ancient Greek literature. It is set during the tenth year of the Achaian (i.e., Greek) siege of the city of Ilion (i.e., Troy) in Asia Minor and describes the fallout of a bitter feud between the Achaian warrior Achilleus and Agamemnon, the king of Mykenai and the leader of the Achaian army.

As I discuss in greater detail in this post I wrote back in August 2019, by the fifth century BCE, the Iliad and its sister epic the Odyssey had become the most revered works of Greek literature. They became the foundation for an upper-class Greek education and exerted an enormous, outsized influence on works of Greek literature from that period onward.

Despite its fame and literary prestige, however, the Iliad also contains one of the most colorfully insulting passages in all of ancient literature. In Book One of the epic, when the feud between Achilleus and Agamemnon first breaks out, Achilleus shouts at Agamemnon (Il. 1.225–232):

“οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ᾽ ἔχων, κραδίην δ᾽ ἐλάφοιο,
οὔτέ ποτ᾽ ἐς πόλεμον ἅμα λαῷ θωρηχθῆναι
οὔτε λόχον δ᾽ ἰέναι σὺν ἀριστήεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν
τέτληκας θυμῷ: τὸ δέ τοι κὴρ εἴδεται εἶναι.
ἦ πολὺ λώϊόν ἐστι κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν
δῶρ᾽ ἀποαιρεῖσθαι ὅς τις σέθεν ἀντίον εἴπῃ:
δημοβόρος βασιλεὺς ἐπεὶ οὐτιδανοῖσιν ἀνάσσεις:
ἦ γὰρ ἂν Ἀτρεΐδη νῦν ὕστατα λωβήσαιο.”

This means, in my own English translation:

“You wine-sodden man who has the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer!
You have never meanwhile taken up arms with your people for war
nor gone on an ambush with the chiefs of the Achaians;
you have died in your heart and it is possible for you to see Death.
It is much preferable throughout the wide army of the Achaians
that whoever speaks against you should be deprived of his gift of honor.
King who devours his own people, since you rule as lord over nobodies,
for otherwise, son of Atreus, you would abuse for the last time!”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a mosaic from the House of Apollo in the Roman city of Pompeii dating to the first century CE, depicting a scene from the Iliad, Book One, in which Athena stops Achilleus from killing Agamemnon

Margaret Graver, the Aaron Lawrence Professor in Classics at Dartmouth College, points out in her paper “Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult” (published in 1995 in the academic journal Classical Antiquity, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 41–61 and available through this link for those who have JSTOR access) that, in early Greek literature, dogs are frequently associated with unrestrained gluttony, material greed, and thievery. Graver therefore argues that Achilleus’s description of Agamemnon as having the “κυνὸς ὄμματ᾽” (“eyes of a dog”) is most likely supposed to mean that he has greedy eyes that are always looking around for things to steal.

Joel P. Christensen, a professor and chair of classical studies at Brandeis University, also emphasizes in this blog post he wrote in August 2018 about the passage I have just quoted that this insult also bears an undercurrent of misogyny; works of early Greek literature compare women to dogs far more often than men and they frequently associate the negative qualities of dogs with women in general.

Greek men normatively believed that all women are naturally supposed to be absolutely subservient to their male guardians in much the same way that dogs are subservient to their human owners. They also believed that women usually lack the level self-control that is natural for most men and are therefore naturally far more susceptible to dog-like vices such as gluttony and greed. When Achilleus compares Agamemnon to a dog, he is therefore not only calling Agamemnon greedy, but also implicitly comparing him to a woman, implying that he is his natural inferior who should be subservient to him.

As for the second part of Achilleus’s opening insult, the ancient Greeks usually regarded the heart as the seat of courage. Meanwhile, deer are well known to flee from hunters and are frequently associated in early Greek literature with cowardice. Achilleus’s description of Agamemnon as having the “κραδίην . . . ἐλάφοιο” (“heart of a deer”) is therefore most likely supposed to mean that he is a coward who avoids battle and is therefore unmanly and worthless.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the eyes of a dog, an animal which the ancient Greeks associated with uncontrolled gluttony and material greed

Sappho 55

Sappho was a very early female Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, in around the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. She composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language and is one of the very few ancient Greek or Roman female authors who have any works that have survived to the present day.

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in August 2021, extremely little reliable information about Sappho’s life has survived and trying to reconstruct any kind of “biography” for her whatsoever is extremely problematic, especially given that the speaker in her poems most likely reflects an artistic persona rather than her actual, unvarnished thoughts and feelings.

Sappho’s work was highly revered in antiquity, but, sadly, extremely little of it has survived and most of the poems that have survived are fragmentary. As I discuss in greater depth in this older blog post I wrote in December 2019, the loss of so much of Sappho’s poetry is most likely mainly due to a decline in the popularity of lyric poetry in general in later antiquity, combined with a later perception of the Aeolic dialect as difficult and obscure.

One of Sappho’s less famous poems is Fragment 55, in which she vigorously insults a woman (whose name does not occur anywhere in the extant text of the fragment) by telling her that, when she dies, no one will remember her. The Greek text of the poem reads as follows:

“κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα μναμοσύνα σέθεν
ἔσσετ’ οὐδὲ πόθα εἰς ὔστερον· οὐ γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων
τὼν ἐκ Πιερίας, ἀλλ’ ἀφάνης κἀν Ἀίδα δόμῳ
φοιτάσῃς πεδ’ ἀμαύρων νεκύων ἐκπεποταμένα.”

This means, in my own translation:

“But, when you have died, you will lie [in the grave] and there will never be any memory of you
nor will there be any desire [for you] afterward. For you will not partake of the roses
from Pieria; instead, you will be forgotten, if you go, flitting away among
the faint dead in the house of Hades.”

The best thing about this poem is that roughly two thousand six hundred years have passed since Sappho composed it and her prediction has come absolutely true. Today in the twenty-first century, Sappho herself is a household name throughout the entire western world, but there is no surviving record whatsoever of the woman to whom Sappho addresses this poem other than the poem itself, the extant text of which includes no mention whatsoever of her name, nor any explanation of who she was or what she did to make Sappho so mad at her (assuming that she was even a real person at all and not merely a fictional character whom Sappho made up). All memory of her has been erased.

It is not clear whether Sappho intentionally avoided using the name of the woman whom she insults here in order to prevent it from being remembered or if she did originally use the woman’s name in a part of the poem that has not survived. I personally like to imagine that, even when the poem was complete, it did not contain the woman’s name.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure hydria dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Sappho sitting on a chair reading from one of her poems, surrounded by three women, one of whom is holding a lyre

Alkaios 332

The lyric poet Alkaios of Mytilene (lived c. 625 – c. 580 BCE) was a perhaps slightly younger contemporary of Sappho. Like her, he lived on the island of Lesbos just off the coast of Asia Minor. He is known for his many surviving fragments about drinking, war, and the turbulent politics of Mytilene during his lifetime.

One of Alkaios’s more famous poems is Fragment 332, in which he declares that every man must drink in celebration of the joyous occasion of the death of Myrsilos, the tyrant of Lesbos. The preserved text of the fragment reads as follows:

“νῦν χρῆ μεθύσθην καί τινα πὲρ βίαν
πώνην, ἐπειδὴ κάτθανε Μύρσιλος.”

This means:

“Now it is necessary for a man to get drunk and
drink with his very might, since Myrsilos has died.”

These two lines were most likely the beginning of a poem that was originally much longer. Unfortunately, the rest of the poem, apart from these two short lines, has not survived.

It’s hard to say whether this fragment is more insulting than the fragment by Sappho I have just quoted. Where Sappho says that the woman she insults will be forgotten after her death, Alkaios declares that Myrsilos’s death itself should be jubilantly celebrated.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure kalanthos by the Brygos Painter dating to c. 470 BCE, currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, depicting Alkaios and Sappho holding lyres and plectrums

Hipponax 12

Hipponax of Ephesos was an ancient Greek iambic poet who lived in around the late sixth century BCE. Nothing reliable whatsoever is known about his historical life. Although some of his surviving fragments narrate his own supposed escapades from the first-person perspective, the speaker in the poems is almost certainly a fictitious personality or persona who does not accurately reflect the poet’s actual life. Later tradition claims that he was strikingly hideous in his appearance, but this detail is probably also fictional.

Hipponax’s verses are notorious because they are nearly all shockingly obscene or even pornographic and they include some of the most vigorously insulting lines in all of ancient literature. The people he insults may be fictional characters rather than real people, but this is not certain.

I have previously quoted some of his memorable lines on this blog in this post I wrote back in February 2021 about ancient Greek profanity, but I will quote some of them again here. One of his more famous insults occurs in his Fragment 12, which reads as follows:

“τούτοισι θηπέων τοὺς Ἐρυθραίων παῖδας
ὁ μητροκοίτης Βούπαλος σὺν Ἀρήτῃ
καὶ ὑφέλξων τὸν δυσώνυμον ἄρτον.”

This means:

“With these words fooling the sons of the Erythraians,
Boupalos, the motherfucker with Arete,
was also preparing to pull back his ill-named foreskin.”

This fragment is, as far as I am aware, the oldest attested use of the term “motherfucker” as an insult.

ABOVE: Illustration printed in the Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum, published by the French printer-bookseller Guillaume Rouillé in 1553, depicting what the artist imagined Hipponax of Ephesos might have looked like

Hipponax 28

Another one of Hipponax’s most notorious insults occurs in his Fragment 28. The complete fragment reads as follows in the original Greek:

“Μιμνῆ κατωμόχανε, μηκέτι γράψῃς
ὄφιν τριήρεος ἐν πολυζύγῳ τοίχῳ
ἀπ᾿ ἐμβόλου φεύγοντα πρὸς κυβερνήτην·
αὕτη γάρ ἐστι συμφορή τε καὶ κληδών,
νικύρτα καὶ σάβαννι, τῷ κυβερνήτῃ,
ἢν αὐτὸν ὄφις τὠντικνήμιον δάκῃ.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Mimnes, you man who has been fucked in the ass so many times that your asshole gapes all the way to your shoulders! Never again paint
a snake on a trireme’s many-benched side
that runs from the prow to the helmsman!
For that is a disaster and an omen for the helmsman,
you slave born of a slave and [something],
if the snake bites him in the shin.”

The word νικύρτα (nikýrta), which Hipponax uses in line five, does not occur in any other known passage, but the late antique lexicographer Hesychios of Alexandria, who probably lived in around the fifth or sixth century CE, helpfully glosses it to mean “slave born of a slave.” The word σάβαννι (sábanni), which Hipponax uses in the same line, also occurs nowhere else and is not glossed. It is clearly a term of insult, but no one alive today knows what it means.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Athenian relief carving discovered on the Akropolis depicting rowers of an Athenian trireme, dating to c. 410 BCE

More fun insults from Hipponax

Hipponax, of course, did not just write poems attacking other men; he also seems to have written many poems attacking women. A variety of memorable, single-word insults that he apparently used against various women have been preserved through quotation in various sources. Sadly, we know very little about the context of most of these insults, but they are entertaining to read:

• Frg. 135: “ἀνασεισίφαλλος” (“cock-shaker”)

• Frg. 135a: “ἀνασυρτόλις” (“self-exposer”)

• Frg. 135b: “βορβορόπη” (“opening of filth”)

• Frg. 144: “βολβίτου κασιγνήτην” (“sister of cowshit”)

Meleagros of Gadara insult poem against an aged prostitute in Greek Anthology 5.204

Meleagros of Gadara was a poet and anthologist who was most likely born sometime in the second half of the second century BCE in Gadara (i.e., modern-day Umm Qais), a city in what is now northern Jordan that was under the rule of the Greek Seleukid Empire at the time. At some point when he was young, he acquired an education in the Greek language and literature in the city of Tyre.

The exact dates of Meleagros’s lifetime are unclear, but he most likely was at his peak sometime around the 90s BCE or thereabouts. He composed a large number of epigrams in the Greek language and collected his own poems together with those of other poets into an anthology which he called The Garland. This anthology is the original basis for what would eventually become the Greek Anthology, a collection of ancient epigrams in the Greek language. One hundred thirty-four of Meleagros’s own poems have been preserved through this anthology.

Most of Meleagros’s surviving poems are about erotic desire, love, and romantic disappointment. One poem that he wrote attacking an aged prostitute for her withered appearance, however, is absolutely scathing. The poem, which is found in the Greek Anthology 5.204 reads as follows:

“Οὐκέτι Τιμάριον, τὸ πρὶν γλαφυροῖο κέλητος
πῆγμα, φέρει πλωτὸν Κύπριδος εἰρεσίην·
ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ μὲν νώτοισι μετάφρενον, ὡς κέρας ἱστῷ,
κυρτοῦται, πολιὸς δ᾽ ἐκλέλυται πρότονος,
ἱστία δ᾽ αἰωρητὰ χαλᾷ σπαδονίσματα μαστῶν,
ἐκ δὲ σάλου στρεπτὰς γαστρὸς ἔχει ῥυτίδας,
νέρθε δὲ πάνθ᾽ ὑπέραντλα νεώς, κοίλῃ δὲ θάλασσα
πλημμύρει, γόνασιν δ᾽ ἔντρομός ἐστι σάλος.
δύστανος τίς ζωὸς ἔτ᾽ ὢν Ἀχερουσίδα λίμνην
πλεύσετ᾽ ἄνωθ᾽ ἐπιβὰς γραὸς ἐπ᾽ εἰκοσόρου;”

This means, in my own translation:

“No longer can Timarion, who was once the sturdy frame of a swift ship,
bear the floating and rowing of Kypris,
but rather, on her backside, her upper back, just like the horn on a mast,
is hunched, and her gray forestays hang out,
and the sails of her breasts are hanging loose, totally flaccid,
and, from the tossing of the waves, she has the wrinkles of a soft belly,
and, down below, she is full of water of the ship, and the sea is flooding
her hollow, and a tossing tremble is in her knees.
What wretched man who is still alive would sail the Acheron lake
after having embarked onto such an ancient twenty-oared coffin galley?”

ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing a Roman marble statue dating to between c. 14 and c. 68 CE, based on an earlier Greek sculpture of the second century BCE, depicting an aged woman, possibly a hetaira, on her way to a festival of the god Dionysos, currently held in the Met

Catullus 16

Gaius Catullus Valerius (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) was an ancient Roman poet who lived during the late Roman Republic. He is known for his wildly diverse oeuvre of carmina or “songs,” which includes everything from tender love poems to viciously insulting, obscene invective poems.

One of Catullus’s most notorious poems is “Carmen 16,” composed in hendecasyllabic meter, in which he attacks two critics of his poetry named Aurelius and Furius. These men apparently read his tender love poems, mocked them as effeminate, and accused the poet himself of allowing other men to sexually penetrate him. In response, Catullus accuses his detractors themselves of allowing other men to sexually penetrate them and declares that he will prove that he is manlier and superior to them by sexually penetrating them both himself:

“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est,
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis,
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
vos quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.”

This means, in my own English translation:

“I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats,
pathic Aurelius and bottom Furius,
you who think from my little verses,
since they are tender, that I am not decent enough.
For it is fitting that a devout poet be morally pure
himself, but it is nothing necessary that his little verses be.
In fact, they have salt and charm
if they are tender and not decent enough
and because they can incite [so that someone] becomes aroused. I say this not for boys, but for those hairy men
who cannot move their inflexible loins.
You, because you’ve read my many thousands of kisses,
think that I am badly a man?
I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats!”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern bust showing what the artist imagined the ancient Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus might have looked like

Catullus 97

Believe it or not, Catullus 16 is not even Catullus’s most insulting poem in my opinion. Instead, in my opinion, his most thoroughly and viciously insulting poem, which is perhaps the most insulting and obscene poem that has survived from the entire ancient world, is Carmen 97, in which he attacks a man named Aemilius for his poor oral hygiene. The poem reads as follows in the original Latin:

“Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi
utrumne os an culum olfacerem Aemilio.
nilo mundius hoc, nihiloque immundius illud,
verum etiam culus mundior et melior:
nam sine dentibus est. hoc dentis sesquipedalis,
gingivas vero ploxeni habet veteris,
praeterea rictum qualem diffissus in aestu
meientis mulae cunnus habere solet.
hic futuit multas et se facit esse venustum,
et non pistrino traditur atque asino?
quem si qua attingit, non illam posse putemus
aegroti culum lingere carnificis?”

This means, in my own English translation:

“I think it does not matter at all (so may the deities help me!)
whether I smell Aemilius’s mouth or his asshole.
In no way is the former any cleaner, and in no way is the latter any dirtier.
In fact, his asshole is actually cleaner and better:
for it is without teeth. His mouth has teeth a foot-and-a-half long
and gums truly like an old wagon-box.
Furthermore, it tends to have a gape just like
the cunt of a pissing she-mule, cleaved open in the summer heat.
He fucks many women and he thinks that he is handsome
and is he not handed over to the mill for the donkey?
If a woman touches him, then do we not suppose that she would
lick the asshole of a diseased executioner?”

Martial’s Epigrams 3.81

Marcus Valerius Martialis (lived 38 or 41 – c. 103 CE), commonly known today in English as “Martial,” was an ancient Roman poet who lived in the city of Augusta Bilbilis (modern-day Calatayud) in what is now the province of Zaragoza in northern Spain. He was extraordinarily prolific and, over the course of the last roughly seventeen years of his life, he produced an enormous corpus of epigrams in the Latin language, 1,561 of which have survived to the present day, preserved in a collection that spans thirteen books. The vast majority of his surviving epigrams are obscene insult poems.

Martial has far more memorable insult poems than I could possibly ever quote here, but I will quote a few of them that I personally find especially amusing or interesting for what they reveal about Roman society in the first century CE. I highly recommend that anyone who is interested in ancient Roman invective poetry read the rest of his corpus.

The first of Martial’s insult poems that I am going to quote specifically attacks a person named Baeticus, who is a Gallus. The Galli were a group of devotees of the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele (known in Latin as Cybele) who are attested from around the third century BCE onward. Although they were all assigned male at birth, they intentionally castrated themselves upon becoming Galli and, from that moment onward, dressed in women’s clothing, wore their hair long in styles that the Greeks and Romans perceived as feminine, wore perfume and makeup, and altogether adopted a feminine manner of presentation.

Galli lived an itinerant mendicant lifestyle, meaning they traveled around without permanent homes and survived by begging people for food and supplies. They were known for performing ecstatic dances in honor of Kybele at religious festivals to the music of the aulos (a kind of double-reeded woodwind instrument), the tympanon (a hand drum), and castanets and they claimed to possess the gift of prophecy.

Ancient elite male Greek and Roman authors routinely attacked and ridiculed the Galli and portrayed them as foreign, effeminate, weak, disgusting non-men—the exact opposite of everything that, in their minds, a Greek or Roman man was supposed to be. In particular, they regarded the Galli as sexually passive and believed that they were naturally suited for superior, masculine, reproductively intact men to sexually penetrate.

For further information, I’ve written about the Galli in much greater detail several times on this blog, including in this post I originally wrote in August 2020 about people in the ancient Mediterranean world who might be considered transgender or gender-variant and this post I wrote in February 2022 about the perception of eunuchs in the ancient Mediterranean.

In his Epigrams 3.81, Martial attacks the Gallus Baeticus as follows:

“Quid cum femineo tibi, Baetice galle, barathro?
haec debet medios lambere lingua viros.
abscisa est quare Samia tibi mentula testa,
si tibi tam gratus, Baetice, cunnus erat?
castrandum caput est: nam sis licet inguine gallus,
sacra tamen Cybeles decipis: ore vir es.”

This means, in my own translation:

“What concern is there for you, Baeticus the Gallus, with the feminine chasm?
Your tongue should be licking male middles!
Why was your cock cut off with a shard of Samian pottery
if cunt was so pleasing to you, Baeticus?
Your head needs to be castrated! For, although it is permitted that you are a Gallus with respect to your groin,
you are cheating the sacred rites of Cybele; you are a man with respect to your mouth.”

An important piece of cultural context to understanding Martial’s joke in the last line here is that, as I discuss in this post I wrote in January of this year, the ancient Greeks and Romans normatively regarded the act of performing cunnilingus as nominally sexually active, but also submissive. In fact, they regarded it as arguably the lowest, most debased, degrading, and unmanly form of sexual contact and as essentially the only way that a person could sexually submit to a woman.

Because they regarded women as naturally inferior to men, they regarded sexually submitting to a woman as even worse than sexually submitting to a man. Sexually submitting to a man meant that a person was that man’s inferior, but sexually submitting to a woman meant that a person was even more inferior than a woman. Thus, Martial calls Baeticus a “man” in the sense that he is being nominally sexually active rather than passive, but at the same time makes fun of him for being submissive and inferior even to women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a funerary relief of an Archigallus from Lavinium dated to the second century CE on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

Martial’s satires against Philaenis

Martial ruthlessly mocks many other people aside from just Baeticus. Notably, as I discuss in much greater detail in this post I wrote in April 2022 about ancient Greek and Roman attitudes toward same-gender-attracted women, his work also contains some of the very few references in Greek or Roman literature to the existence of women who have sex with other women.

In his Epigrams 7.67, Martial makes fun of a masculine Greek woman named Philaenis, whom he portrays as, among other things, having regular sex in the penetrative role with both women and boys in exactly the same manner that might be typical of a Greek or Roman man. He writes:

“Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis
et tentigine saevior mariti
undenas dolat in die puellas.
Harpasto quoque subligata ludit,
et flavescit haphe, gravesque draucis
halteras facili rotat lacerto,
et putri lutulenta de palaestra
uncti verbere vapulat magistri:
nec cenat prius aut recumbit ante,
quam septem vomuit meros deunces;
ad quos fas sibi tunc putat redire,
cum coloephia sedecim comedit.
Post haec omnia cum libidinatur,
non fellat—putat hoc parum virile—
sed plane medias vorat puellas.
Di mentem tibi dent tuam, Philaeni,
cunnum lingere quae putas virile.”

This means, in my own translation from the Latin:

“The tribade Philaenis ass-fucks boys
and, fiercer than a husband with a stiff erection,
she cleaves eleven girls every day.
Tied back, she also plays with a handball,
and she pats herself with sand, and she easily
swings around dumbbells heavy for weightlifters with her bicep,
and, muddying herself with filth from the palaestra [i.e., the wrestling place],
she is beaten by her greasy instructor with a scourge.
And she does not dine first or recline
until she has puked up seven wines eleven-twelfths unmixed,
toward which she then thinks it her own divine law to return
when she devours sixteen cuts of meat.
After all these things, when she is lusting,
she does not suck cock—she thinks that this is hardly manly—
but she plainly devours the middles of girls.
The deities give you back your mind, Philaenis,
you who think that to lick cunt is manly.”

Martial returns to mock Philaenis again in his Epigrams 7.70:

“Ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni,
recte, quam futuis, vocas amicam.”

This means, again in my own translation:

“Tribade of tribades themselves, Philaenis,
rightly do you call she whom you fuck your girlfriend.”

Throughout these poems, Martial portrays Philaenis as a woman who has an aberrant and unnatural desire to be like a man, but who can never really be like a man because she doesn’t have a penis and will therefore always be inferior and inadequate. The intended humor of these poems relies on the assumption that all Philaenis’s attempts to act like a man will never amount to anything other than complete failure and that she is therefore a ridiculous laughingstock.

This comes through especially clearly in the punchline of the first poem I have quoted here, in which Martial describes Philanis as performing cunnilingus—a sexual act that she thinks is manly because it is nominally active, but that Martial expects his readers to understand is really the absolute lowest, most unmanly form of sexual contact imaginable, because it is the only way that a person can sexually submit to a woman.

At the same time, Judith P. Hallett argues in her chapter “Female Homosexualities” in the book Roman Sexualities, published in 1997 by Princeton University Press, that Martial repeatedly describes Philaenis as performing the phallic role of the penetrator in intercourse with women in order to emphasize her lack of a true penis. She also argues that the second-to-last line of the first poem, in which Martial says “The deities give you back your mind,” is a pun, because the Latin word mens, meaning “mind,” sounds similar to the word mentula, meaning “cock.”

ABOVE: Badly damaged wall painting from the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, dating to the first century CE, depicting two women engaging in some form of sexual activity together

Martial’s Epigrams 11.66

Upper-class ancient Greek and Roman men frequently harbored a deep-seated distrust of basically everyone who was of lower social status than themselves, especially those who were deeply impoverished. Given this fact, it is hardly surprising that Roman invective poems frequently assume or imply that, if someone is poor, then it must be because they lack self-control and they waste all the money they earn on frivolous, short-lived pleasures.

On the other hand, upper-class Greek and Roman men also harbored a fear that people from the lower classes whom they viewed as innately inferior might rise through the socioeconomic hierarchy and become socially accepted as their equals. Greek and Roman authors therefore routinely portray basically anyone who has become wealthy without having inherited their wealth from their forebears as having acquired their fortune through crooked, dishonorable, and fraudulent means.

Martial invokes both of these tropes at once in his Epigrams 11.66:

“Et delator es et calumniator,
et fraudator es et negotiator,
et fellator es et lanista. Miror
quare non habeas, Vacerra, nummos.”

This means, in my own translation:

“You are a snitch and a false accuser
and a con artist and a businessman
and a cocksucker and trainer of gladiators. I am astonished,
Vacerra, why you don’t have money!”

Here, Martial says that Vacerra is so conniving and crooked that one would naturally expect him to have become very wealthy. The joke, though, is that he is actually completely penniless. Martial further implies that the reason why Vacerra is penniless is probably because he lacks self-control and has recklessly squandered all his ill-gotten gains on ephemeral pleasures.

ABOVE: The Romans in their Decadence, painted by the French history painter Thomas Couture in 1847