Pandects. Unnatural vice I touch with reluctance, and dispatch with impatience, a more odious vice, of which modesty rejects the name, and nature abominates the idea. The primitive Romans were infected by the example of the Etruscans[1] and Greeks;[2] in the mad abuse of prosperity and power, every pleasure that is innocent was deemed insipid; and the Scatinian law,[3] which had been extorted by an act of violence, was insensibly abolished by the lapse of time and the multitude of criminals. By this law, the rape, perhaps the seduction, of an ingenuous youth was compensated, as a personal injury, by the poor damages of ten thousand sesterces, or fourscore pounds; the ravisher might be slain by the resistance or revenge of chastity; and I wish to believe that at Rome, as in Athens, the voluntary and effeminate deserter of his sex was degraded from the honours and the rights of a citizen.[4] But the practice of vice was not discouraged by the severity of opinion; the indelible stain of manhood was confounded with the more venial transgressions of fornication and adultery; nor was the licentious lover exposed to the same dishonour which he impressed on the male or female partner of his guilt. From Catullus to Juvenal,[5] the poets accuse and celebrate the degeneracy of the times, and the reformation of manners was feebly attempted by the reason and authority of the civilians, till the most virtuous of the Cæsars proscribed the sin against nature as a crime against society.[6]
- ↑ Timon [leg. Timæus] (l. i.) and Theopompus (l. xliii. apud Athenæum, l. xii. p. 517 [c. 14]) describe the luxury and lust of the Etruscans: πολὺ μέντοι γε χαίρουσι συνόντες τοɩ̂ς παισὶ καὶ τοɩ̂ς μειρακίοις. About the same period (A.U.C. 445), the Roman youth studied in Etruria (Liv. ix. 36).
- ↑ The Persians had been corrupted in the same school: ἀπ’ Ἐλλήνων μαθόντες παισὶ μίσγονται (Herodot. l. i. c. 135). A curious dissertation might be formed on the introduction of pæderasty after the time of Homer, its progress among the Greeks of Asia and Europe, the vehemence of their passions, and the thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens. But, scelera ostendi oportet dum puniuntur, abscondi flagitia.
- ↑ The name, the date, and the provisions of this law are equally doubtful (Gravina, Opp. p. 432, 433. Heineccius, Hist. Jur. Rom. No. 108. Ernesti, Clav. Ciceron. in Indice Legum). But I will observe that the nefanda Venus of the honest German is styled aversa by the more polite Italian.
- ↑ See the oration of Æschines against the catamite Timarchus (in Reiske, Orator. Græc. tom. iii. p. 21-184).
- ↑ A crowd of disgraceful passages will force themselves on the memory of the classic reader: I will only remind him of the cool declaration of Ovid:
Odi concubitus qui non utrumque resolvunt.
Hoc est quod puerum tangar amore minus. - ↑ Ælius Lampridius, in Vit. Heliogabal, in Hist. August. p. 112 [xvii. 32, 6]. Aurelius Victor, in Philippo [Cæs., 28], Codex Theodos. l. ix. tit. vii. leg. 7 [leg. 6; A.D. 390], and Godefroy's Commentary, tom. iii. p. 63. Theodosius abolished the subterraneous brothels of Rome, in which the prostitution of both sexes was acted with impunity.
