Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores онлайн

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During the Roman Empire, with the increase of childless families, women were able to give more scope to their femininity, their sexual appeal, and their erotic allurements. As a consequence, there was an upsurge of marital license, on the part of both husband and wife, but notoriously so in the case of the women. This situation reached the most shameless depths, as the poet Juvenal testifies: and as the Church Fathers later on asserted, in their wholesale condemnations of pagan practices.

Early in the first century A.D. the insidious decline of domestic morality became so manifest that imperial decrees required marriage in the case of men under sixty and of women under fifty: and these ordinances also restricted the freedoms of bachelorhood.

Marriage was thus officially encouraged, and large families were granted special privileges and monetary awards from the imperial treasury. But these and similar measures were abortive in their primary purpose. For prostitution flourished and grew and became so flagrant and yet so characteristically identified with later Roman society that there were at least a score of designations for the public harlot, according to her social status, her price, and her locale. Thus lust and eros were rampantly triumphant.