A TIL Post Claims Claudius was the Only Emperor of the First 15 Emperors of Rome to NOT take a Male Lover. Is this true?

by ma582

Over in TIL, this post has about 3,700: TIL that Claudius was the only one of the first 15 Roman emperors not to take a male lover. Others considered him strange for only being attracted to women. Is this true? I can't believe that Romans found him strange because he was only attracted to women; surely many other men were attracted to women only, right?

LegalAction

I'm not researching all 15 emperors, just Augustus. Suetonius has this:

In early youth he incurred the reproach of sundry shameless acts. Sextus Pompey taunted him with effeminacy; Mark Antony with having earned adoption by his uncle through unnatural relations; and Lucius, brother of Mark Antony, that after sacrificing his honour to Caesar he had given himself to Aulus Hirtius in Spain for three hundred thousand sesterces, and that he used to singe his legs with red-hot nutshells, to make the hair grow softer. What is more, one day when there were plays in the theatre, all the people took as directed against him and loudly applauded the following line, spoken on the stage and referring to a priest of the Mother of the Gods, as he beat his timbrel: "See'st how a wanton's finger sways the world?"

But notice the sources - Sextus Pompey, Mark and Lucius Anthony. This is political slander, and Suetonius later says Augustus dealt with these accusations quite handily.

Regarding the charges of making a fetish of seducing his friends' wives and deflowering virgins, Suetonius says he wasn't able to shake those.

I sincerely doubt the charge of sleeping with Caesar or Hirtius, and I don't know of any other author that records this charge. I'm even suspicious of his philandering - that would be extremely bad decision making for a man forcing chastity on the upper classes and who banished his daughter when she was caught in adultery. But I suppose monarchs can always be hypocrites.

Anyway, I don't think Augustus had a male lover, so no, the article is not correct.

mp96

I read that 'article', and it's subpar to say the least. There are no sources in it at all, there is nothing that explains where the author gets his information from or how he draws his conclusions. The way the argument goes in the article, the author even shows a lack of understanding of how the Romans percieved same-sex intercourse. It is a rather comfortable 'article' to write for someone who's only looking for clicks, because it is very hard to prove beyond any doubt that it isn't true.

Personally, I'll stay very sceptical of that claim until someone comes forward with overwhelming evidence to prove the contrary. Suggestions like these, which essentially say that the respective emperors were lesser men, are not uncommon to see in - above all - Suetonius. The only emperor of the first 15 (Augustus-Antoninus Pius) that we actually know had a male lover was Hadrian, and that is through more than simple rumours.

Tiako

The particular passage in Suetonius this is being pulled from is Caludius 33:

Libidinis in feminas profusissimae, marum omnino expers

This is sort of difficult to translate, but basically "in his desire for women he was voracious, but entirely without [desire for] men." That Suetonius comments on it indicates that it was at least worth commenting on, but I'm not sure how much of a mountain we want to make out of the seven word molehill.

TheJucheisLoose

You have to remember that a lot of Roman Emperors had many detractors (sometimes in their lives and sometimes after their deaths), some of whom were quite famous and respected writers and political figures. Then, as now, one of the commonest insults you can use to dismiss a man as a person worthy of respect is to call him effeminate or woman-like. Accusing someone of being a catemite is certainly one way to do this, and this, I think, is what gave rise to a lot of these rumors. It's probably that some Roman Emperors were gay or bisexual (or at least dabbled in homoeroticism), but the degree and commonality implied by OP's statistic is highly unlikely to be true. One must consider one's sources.