[GUYS, THIS IS TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY MADE UP. WHILE ALL THE SOURCES ARE ACTUAL SOURCES, NONE OF THE STUFF ABOUT LESBIANS IS REAL. HAPPY APRIL FOOLS 2014!]

Ahhhh my favorite topic! And on a day when I have literally nothing to do but clean my house. This is much more fun than that, so I choose ladyloving over laundry. This is why you're the best, /u/Daeres. Strap in and strap on, cause here we go.

I'm going to preface this with the usual caveat that we cannot use anachronistic terms like lesbian and gay to describe Roman sexuality. Romans didn't think of their sexuality in that way. You're welcome to search the FAQ for more information on this, or I can come back and link previous posts I've done on the subject later. That being said, there were men who had sex primarily with men, and women who had sex primarily with women. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to refer to those women as lesbians here, though it was not what the Romans called them.

I've spoken before about the hilariously strange ideas that Roman men had about what two women did together in bed - Martial called it "a mystery worthy of the sphinx" (1.90) - but it was partially because of the lack of understanding that Roman men had regarding lesbian culture that lesbians held positions of power and respect at many levels of society which not usually afforded Roman women. They had the freedom and status to make decisions without the onus of a paterfamilias, and this scandalized some - Cato the Younger in particular called for a return to the days of his father, when women stayed under the auspices of their paterfamilias from birth til death, no matter whether they married, remained celibate, or declared themselves to be semper cum mulieribus.

Still, from the 1st century CE we begin to see the variety of positions which lesbians enjoyed in Roman society mentioned in texts as diverse as Petronius's Satyricon - lesbian wine merchants trick Trimalchio into serving his guests cheap Massic wine instead of the Falernian he bought, causing him to blame a slave for the error - to the erotic poems of Gaius Memmius which Ovid mentions in his Tristes ii. 433:

Why allude to the verse of Ticidas

or of Memmius, in whom things are named with

names free from shame? With them belongs the wares of the women,

more wanton than Cinna, and the instruments feared by Cornificius

and Cato, and those used in the bed of she who was but recently hidden

beneath the name of Perilla, now found called after

thy name, Metellus.

Yep, as well as being merchants and traders, one particular group of lesbians who lived in the town of Mutina - modern day Modena, the home of the Metellus to whom Ovid was speaking - were famed makers of what are sometimes referred to as marital aids today. They revolutionized the art of the dildo, finding new materials to use and adding true craftsmanship to what had previously been a rather unimaginative sex toy. Most notably, the Mutina workshop is, as far as we know, the origin point of the strap-on - a phallus with a carefully crafted metal core, padded with linen and encased in leather (sadly the organic material in this example has decayed away) which could be connected to a leather harness.

These professions, though, were held mostly by lesbians at the lower and middle levels of the Roman class system. Within the upper classes, lesbians were valued above anyone as bodyguards for hire.

There were a few reasons for this - in particular, the qualities associated with virtus meant that while loyalty was valued as a masculine trait, it was not something that one was meant to be able to buy. A true Roman man was loyal to his paterfamilias and his gens first and foremost, and was not meant to even be able to lie. Men who stepped out of the bounds of virtus in any way were untrustworthy, not people that a Roman would want to have any association with. Thus a man whose loyalty could be bought was not a true man, and association with men like that would end in disaster. Women, on the other hand, had no such restrictions, and women who had declared themselves semper cum mulieribus had no bonds of paterfamilias to adhere to. They were free to sell their loyalties as they chose.

One particular group of women known as the Conchae Sussurantae - the Silent Pearls, for their subtle technique and the pearl inlay on their ceremonial weapons, described at length in Suetonius 2.38 and 6.15 - were said to have been founded by Bullilla, a descendant of the Amazon Anaea whose tomb on Samos sat within their training grounds. (To be fair, most groups of this nature claimed descent from the Amazons - it was a pretty powerful association. But the Conchae are the most famous.) Again and again the Conchae are mentioned as guarding the richest men in the Roman world between the 1st and 4th centuries AD - from Paterculus at the earliest, through Tacitus in his Agricola (the man himself was guarded by three Conchae who accompanied him to Britannia), with their last mention coming in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. Suetonius claims they guarded Augustus himself in 2.38, and while Suetonius is not exactly reliable, the provisions for women who had declared semper cum mulieribus in the Lex Papia Poppaea passed by Augustus in 9 CE suggest that he had an interest in keeping their status secure.

Obviously this changed in Rome's later years as the Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire separated, and because of the various difficulties in studying Roman sexuality before about 1970 the role of lesbians in Roman society has not generated a lot of academic work as a subject. But it's damn fascinating, and I'm so glad you asked about it!

[ONCE AGAIN: ALL OF THIS STUFF ABOUT LESBIANS IS MADE UP. PLEASE BE SKEPTICAL AND CHECK THE SOURCES PEOPLE POST, EVEN IF THEY'RE A FLAIRED USER. EVEN IF THEY'RE ME!]

With regards to Greece someone should mention the poet Sapho.