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Ancient Roman Masturbation

For the past four years, a photograph of a plaster cast of an ancient Roman man who died in the city of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has been circulating online with the claim that he died while masturbating, since his right hand happens to be positioned near his groin in a masturbation-like pose. Historically speaking, it is highly unlikely that this particular man really died while masturbating. The position of his hand is most likely a result of the muscle contractions resulting from the excruciating heat shock that killed him, rather than the result of anything he was doing before he was killed.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of fascinating historical and archaeological evidence for both male and female masturbation in ancient Rome, including in the city of Pompeii. Needless to say, the following article contains discussion of evidence that is not suitable for children.

Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

Ancient Greek Swear Words

I am currently taking a class at my university about the Roman poet Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE). One of Catullus’s most notorious poems is “Carmen 16,” which begins with a shockingly obscene threat, directed at two critics who thought Catullus’s poetry was effeminate: “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō, Aurēlī pathice et cinaede Fūrī.” In English, this means “I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats, sodomy-lover Aurelius and pervert Furius.” The opening line of this poem was recently quoted in the Netflix comedy series History of Swear Words.

It occurred to me that there is a ton of readily available information on the internet about obscenity in Latin. (Notably, there is an entire Wikipedia article titled “Latin obscenity,” which has an entire section devoted to each word!) Meanwhile, there is virtually nothing accessible and comprehensive on the internet whatsoever about Ancient Greek obscenity that a person who does not already know Ancient Greek might be able to understand. Wikipedia has no article on the subject, I can’t find any blog posts that give comprehensive information, and, if you try to look up an obscene Greek word like πέος in the online LSJ, it gives you an extremely evasive definition in Latin because the word is apparently too obscene to define in English.

I have decided to remedy this situation. Below is a fairly extensive list of various oaths, insults, sexual vocabulary, and vocabulary related to human waste in Ancient Greek. This list should be useful to people who are simply curious about what Greek obscenity was like, people who are writing stories set in ancient Greece who want to incorporate historically accurate obscenity, and, of course, people who want to secretly cuss out their coworkers in Ancient Greek. (Note: It should go without saying that this content is not appropriate for children.)

What Did Jesus Really Say about Homosexuality?

None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.

Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.

Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!

Was Cleopatra Really Hypersexual?

In popular culture, the Ptolemaic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator is routinely portrayed as wildly hypersexual. If you’ve been on the internet lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot of crazy stories about how she supposedly threw wild sex orgies, had sex with over a hundred men in one night, had a vibrator that was powered by angry bees, and once offered to have sex with anyone who wanted it under the condition that they would be executed the next morning.

None of these stories have any kind of basis in the ancient sources, however. In fact, historically speaking, Cleopatra is only known for certain to have had sex with two men in her entire life: Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The popular image of Cleopatra as an insatiable nymphomaniac is ultimately rooted in a vicious Roman propaganda campaign to discredit her, but modern authors, filmmakers, video game developers, and internet factoid-mongers have taken it to a whole new level.