Have male sexual slavery existed in the ancient world? Which civilizations practiced it? Did commoners participated in the buying of male sex slaves too?

It’s important to remember whenever thinking about the way that the ancient world is presented in pop culture that movies will err on the side of sensationalization and titillation - movies like Pompeii and shows like Spartacus draw in viewers partly because of the contrast between the ideas we have about the ancient world (prudish, less “enlightened” than our world, less free for almost everyone) and the realities of the ancient world (a “foreign country” of sorts in which social identities aren’t lesser or greater, but constructed differently).

With that in mind, sexual slavery is one of the horrors of humanity that has existed - and, crucially, continues to exist today - in a variety of forms, for people of every gender identity throughout societies across times and locations.

Before talking about the realities of sexual slavery for male-bodied individuals in a variety of different cultures (including Ancient Rome and Greece, yes, but also Ancient China and Golden-Age Caliphates, and those are the ones that off the top of my head I can provide specific sources for you to explore further) I think that it’s important to ground the discussion in the reality that rape is rape, and that rape against men is just as real and horrific and criminal as rape against women, no matter who is doing it. When we see a male slave being “inspected” for the size of his penis in Spartacus, the underlying message the show gives us isn’t “look at this horrific dehumanization of this person who should have agency and doesn’t” - it’s “hey look at this hot powerful woman and her hot sex toy! Rowr!”

It’s easy to warn against, like, the application of modern social constructs to past experiences. It’s a lot harder to recognize that people in the past whose lives we only know about as the spaces where they’re written around in the sources were full people with a rich inner world, and that the pain and humiliation and disgust and fear - and love and joy and fulfillment and beauty - they felt was just as valid as our own. Just as people have been fucking in every conceivable way and in every possible configuration since humans have walked the world, humans have been feeling, too. The people we’re talking about are dead, but we owe it to them (I believe) to remember that they were people first and foremost.

Okay, with that said: the first thing to recognize when we’re talking specifically about Ancient Rome is that when we’re talking about the Roman matrona, the married upper-class woman who would have had the agency and the resources to purchase slaves of any sort, there would also have been a lot of expectations around chastity (pudicitia) that would have meant that, for most matronae, a full-on dedicated sex servant would have been, uh, not so feasible. We of course see women exercising their abundant sexual appetites throughout Roman literature, from Julia the Elder’s famous orgies described in Seneca to the many, many, many lusty and voracious matronae of Martial’s epigrams (1.73, Caecilius’s wife, and 2.56, Gallus’s wife, of many many many examples) but what we don’t see a lot of is the ownership of slaves for the specific purposes of pleasure. Even with sexual dalliances with men who were slaves for other purposes, such as gladiators, the best we have (as /u/Celebreth points out in this great answer here) is speculation and some filthy Pompeiian graffiti. To imply that someone’s mother had dallied with a slave was a grave insult (as in Martial 1.81, Sosibianus’s mother).

This fits largely with what we know about the role of womanhood in Roman culture, and ideas of the role of femininity vs. masculinity with regard to sex. The role of women was to reflect and receive the energies of men, and women who deviate from the prescribed feminitas have the full weight of societal disapproval come down on them eventually, as ends up happening to Julia The Elder. (And of course, exile and disgrace and death. Let’s not discount that.)

So if it’s not fancy Roman women who are the intended market for expensive male sex slaves, who could —

Haha, just kidding, of course you know it was rich dudes.

We have a lot of evidence of male sexual slavery as one facet of a rich tradition of men fucking other men and boys from across the Classical world. As an unabashed Martial fangirl, I am a particular fan of his poems as a filthy little window into Ancient Roman gossip from one little sliver of the Empire, and they go into fairly specific detail about, for example, the way that Encolpus in 1.31 worries about losing the interest of his dominus the centurion when his body becomes more manly.

The lives of these men was entirely dependent on the men with whom they ended up, and whatever affection they could stir in their masters served as their protection from the vagaries of life. They could end up winning their freedom with their charms, as Martial talks about in the epigrams about Glaucias (6.28 and 6.29) - but either their youth and charms would fade, since the Romans generally shared the Greek erastes/eromenos preference for boys over men as seen in objects like the Warren Cup, or they would be castrated to delay the onset of puberty and the growth of their beards. Which is obviously, uh, not super ideal.

When we turn our eye to other societies, we often see something similar - the poet Ramadi in al-Andalus during the Golden Age of Islam writes of his young African slave, "I looked into his eyes, and became drunken. . . . I am his slave, he is the lord" (Ibn Hazm 1931:59). The Golden Age is full of male poets writing of the pleasures of young male slaves - and, for that matter, non-slaves, who were often the object of unrequited affection as their status as equals under religious law made things quite a bit more challenging as objects of lust. (For more, see “Male Love in Islamic Spain” by Louis Crompton here.)

There are a lot of parallels in our modern-day conception of how sex, love, and enslavement fit together in both of these societies, and my suspicion is because it is a modern tendency to flatten out complexity in an effort to understand. But sex never fits neatly into an easily comprehensible box, and I think this is a mistake.

There are others who may be able to answer your question with respect to other time periods, and I hope they provide as this is a fascinating subject!