In bed with the Romans / Paul Chrystal.

Our popular impression of the Roman Empire is of a seamy, salacious world in which intrigue and sexual licence were ubiquitous at the highest levels of state. Here we explore that familiar elite world as well as the role sex played in broader Roman society from the late Republic to the third century AD from sex in Roman marriage to homosexuality, from sexual graffiti and prostitution to sexual medicine and aphrodisiacs. In Bed with the Romans provides a balanced account of sex and sexuality in ancient Rome over three hundred pivotal years, while at the same time providing a lively and explicit account of the sexual exploits of a number of key protagonists at the end of the Republic and early Empire, the men and women who have come down to us as alleged or actual adulterers, sexual predators or deviants. We meet Clodia, vituperated by Cicero, loved and hated by Catullus; Cleopatra, lover to both Caesar and Antony; Fulvia, excoriated by Octavian; the mothers, wives, mistresses, siblings and children of the Julio-Claudian emperors; Hadrian and his infatuation with Antinous; and we witness the serial depravity of Elagabalus.

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