Eastern luxury as a corrupting influence is everywhere in Roman moralizing literature. Livy claims that the moral decline of Rome began in 187 BCE caused by the return of the Roman army from what would become the Roman province of Asia (Western Turkey). Sallust says that Sulla’s return from Asia in 83 BCE had a similar effect.
But I am very keen on amplifying the idea that by locating the foundation story of the Romans in a figure that descends from the east, the seeds of destruction are already sown within the Romans themselves. Thus, at some level, the Augustan cultural project (i.e. Vergil’s Aenied) focuses on returning to the morals of the past while simultaneously creating a narrative that undermines those exact morals.
Or maybe it is not that simple. Maybe it is an attempt to integrate eastern influence as a foundational aspect of what it means to be Roman (how would that sit for a traditionalist?!). Vergil doesn’t shy away from Aeneas’ effeminacy when he makes note of how Aeneas and the Trojans in general are dressed and styled. The offspring of Aeneas and his son Ascanius cannot escape that eastern element when they mix with the native Latins (even though Juno makes it explicit that she wants it eradicated so that none of what is Trojan infects the new mixed race, Aen. 12.820-830). Jupiter responds with commixti corpore tantum subsident Teucri, “The Trojans having been mixed only in body will remain”; a weird way of saying that the only thing Trojan about the resulting mixture will be physical. Thus Romans, according to this narrative, are at some level physically eastern.
sive mutata iuvenem figura ales in terris imitaris, almae filius Maiae, patiens vocari Caesaris ultor. Serus in caelum redeas diuque laetus intersis populo Quirini, neve te nostris vitiis iniquum ocior aura tollat; hic magnos potius triumphos, hic ames dici pater atque princeps, neu sinas Medos equitare inultos te duce, Caesar.
“Or having changed shape, do you winged one, son of nourishing Maia, imitate the young man on earth, called the unyielding avenger of Caesar? May you return to heaven at a late hour and be present for a long while with the people of Romulus, and may no swifter breeze take you, injured by our crimes. Here are rather great triumphs, here may you love to be pronounced father and first citizen, and, with you as general, not allow the unpunished Medes to ride, Caesar!” – Horace Odes1.2.41-52
Remember the time that Horace wrote that Octavian is really just Mercury in disguise??
Classics claim check: did the Romans proactively seek out children born with ambiguous genitalia—whom today we would call intersex—and kill them?
What are our sources? Livy, Pliny the Elder, and Julius Obsequens.
*To begin with, no ancient writer records the killing of a child born with ambiguous genitalia contemporary with the time they lived or are writing. All examples of the murder of intersex children are depicted as happening at some time in the past.
Infants or children who were labeled “semimas”, “androgynus”, or “hermaphroditus” are recorded among lists of ill-omens and portents that occurred during times of crisis. They are often listed alongside several other omens, for example a lamb born with a pig’s head, a pig born with a human’s head, a colt born with five feet, a child was born with an elephants head, it rained milk, it rained rocks, a cow spoke, the sky glowed red even though it was clear. (Liv. AUC XXXI.12; XXVII.11; XXVII.37; XXXIX.22.)
Pliny the Elder, NH VII.iii.34: “We call those who are born with sex characteristics of both ‘hermaphrodites’, called a long time ago ‘androgynus’ and considered portents, now however in pleasures/delights/as favorites” (Giguntur et utriusque sexu quos hermaphroditos vocamus, olim androgynos vocatos et in prodigiis habitos, nunc vero in deliciis.)
Julius Obsequens (4th/5th cent. CE) wrote a work (prodigiorum liber) listing the occurrence of portents/prodigies from the 3rd cent. BCE to the end of the 1st cent. BCE. It is believed that Obsequens’ primary source is Livy. Obsequens lists 9 cases of intersex children being killed, 8 of them by being thrown into a body of water, between 186 BCE and 92 BCE. However, like in Livy, all these instances are listed alongside other portents and date to a time of crisis for Rome, usually a military or political crisis.
Verdict: No, at least not in any systematic way. That intersex children are born or are found specifically during a time of crisis alongside other portents takes away from the credibility that intersex children were sought out by Roman religious officials and then killed. Livy’s recording of portents, which Julius Obsequens reiterates, has a specific agenda. Portents and prodigies amplify the crises experienced by the Romans to a divine level. Hannibal’s success against the Romans during the Second Punic War as recorded by Livy was seen as an overturning of nature itself and thus must have been accompanied by divine portents that reflected a universe turned on its head. Does this mean that Romans saw children born with ambiguous genitalia as unnatural or undesirable, yes probably. But more than anything it is a comment on the state of the Roman world during a particular moment.
On a different note, according to Diodorus Siculus (c. 90 BCE–c. 30 BCE) and Aulus Gellius (c. 125 CE–180 CE), some intersex people could be quite successful in the ancient Mediterranean world.
For Ovid, women inhabit the landscape as readers and creators of meaning as well as objects of representation; it is by their perversae mentes that the Augustan message of moral rebirth is resisted, reconsidered, and (ultimately) rejected. Far from being passive objects, or even passive recipients, of ideological statements, women for Ovid are a disruptive presence in the landscape, as they refuse to see what they are supposed to see, to imagine what they are supposed to imagine, and to do what they are supposed to do.
Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life
“Ovid’s uncertainty over what kind of gods are in charge of his world in the Metamorphoses shows both that gods are unworthy of respect, and that it is dangerous not to respect them: the poem problematizes both belief and non-belief.”
@readingancientclassics on Instagram is dedicated to discussions of ancient texts, reviews of myth retellings, and group read-alongs of classical literature. I’d love for you to join me there
