Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/72

 Rome republican and monarchical, Rome military and pacific, Rome m power and decadence, was a Rome similisexual as to love. Under the Republic, a certain vague attitude of rebuke to it seems to have existed, but not as to feminine similisexualism. Of the remote Scatinian Law that bore on it, we have vague data; that law appears to have referred to special pederastic practices and to the protection of innocent youth from debauchery. The Lex Julia, another early law dealing with the matter, is also obscure in its scope. We can note the presence of a special legislation of some sort that related to soldiers when in military service, needing a bodily vigour not to be impaired in camps and barracks. This latter detail, by the way, is to-day recognized by modern Italian law, which otherwise takes no notice of sexual passions or practices between men and men, men and youths, women and their own sex, unless public decency is openly outraged, force used, or minor youth debauched.

Under the Roman Empire, however, similisexual love reached a degree of open acceptance, stood on a sentimental footing, in Roman society that met almost no repudiation of it by popular notions. We have but to turn to the pages of the finest flower or the rankest weed-growth of Latin literature, to the historians and biographers of the golden-decadent Roman world, whether giving us pictures of the Palatine or the Suburra, to find it writ large. Legislation cared little for it, save now and then some protective laws for minors, among these Domitian's prohibitive laws against prostitution of young children, which Martial received with such fulsome praise in an epigram. The sentiment in the epoch of the first Caesars degenerated repulsively. It became crudely pederastic, losing all quality of manly idealism. All phases of it obtained. Its prostitutes were legion. The Augustan Age was full of it. One has only to read his Vergil, and the pages of Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, Tibullus, Catullus, Juvenal, Persius, Martial, where each has written part of the long record,