Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/73

 showing us how gross or spiritual was the passion in the Roman temperament. The Empire was filled full with it. The attitudes of high Roman philosophy, did not affect the general views. Not till the Judo-Christian system of Apostolic ethics reached the Imperial throne, and became weighty in Roman statutory law and in the public mind, did the idea that similisexual love was contrary to nature, and to be rooted-out as an evil impulse in the human temperament, become fixed. Even as late as the reign of Alexander Severus (A. D. 222-236) the Roman law dealt only with debauchment of minors. The same reserve is noted under such late legislators as the Emperors Philip, and Aurelius Victor.

That in the voluptuous and decadent social whirlpool of the Twelve Caesars (the Neronian reign especially) the whole aspect of similisexual love became degraded even to outraging all sense of aesthetics, social decency and virility is only too plain. But it was no new matter; no product of mere late-Roman rottenness. The most august and warlike and philosophic and ethic Emperors, or private citizens, were given to homosexual passions, no matter what were their relations to women; and this, too, at a time when ordinary and heterosexual love had no limit to its open vehemence, and to honour or shame. Julius Caesar seems to have been in all years of his life an unqualified passive pederast; satirized as "every man's woman, and every woman's man." His relations to young Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, and to his favorite nephew, who later became the great Augustus, were coarse jests of his day. Augustus the noblest figure in the Roman imperial succession, was similisexual, and by no means confined his intimacies to those with his great predecessor. We find the theater-crowds joking, in the presence of Augustus, as to his habits of the sort; and there is one reference in Plutarch (in the life of Demetrius) to a certain youth called by a significant nick-name "Delicias," who had been a favourite of