How Christianity Cracked Down on Rome's Sexual Free-for-All

A History of Mankind (263)

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Like Plato’s, Paul’s message arrived for the right audience at the right time. Rome had had plenty of experience with complex, exotic eastern religions before, but was first exposed to profoundly conservative, down-from-Abraham Jewish views on society and customs just as the Roman elite was embarked in perhaps the greatest exaltation of debauchery in history.

This was the time when an emperor like Nero openly married men and women, and Petronius-style wits traveled across the empire in search for women and children and any holes they could stick their penises into. The “Warren Cup,” a silver drinking cup believed to have been produced early in the 1^st century¹, displays a bearded man and beardless youth having anal intercourse, in the typically pederastic Greek tradition – and may have been indeed buried with a cache of valuables in Judaea, of all places, during the Great Jewish Revolt.

Athenaeus’ bibliography openly describes a Greek tradition of pederasty that was never fully embraced by the Romans but still remained a common point of reference for the cultured elites since it was right there in black and white all over their favorite books. Citing as source the contemporary poet Ion of Chios, Athenaeus writes about Sophocles’ veritable obsession with young boys, and how once in Chios – already at the age of 55 – he pestered a very beautiful boy during a banquet; that same year, Athenaeus added, Sophocles accosted what likely was a rent-boy outside the walls of Athens, and was robbed of his cloak while resting after the act. The well-regarded 4^th century BC orator Aeschines, in his popular oration “Against Timarchos,” boasted at the age of 42 of the many boys he kept to service his needs².