More on Morality Upgrades

This post is in response to a reader comment about Livy’s mention of Bacchic orgies (see my previous post):

I’m satisfied with Ray Laurence’s credentials. He is a Strategic Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and he seems quite familiar with the source material, both primary and secondary, and his work is thoroughly footnoted so you can see from whence he is deriving his conclusions. In all respects, he appears to be “my” kind of historian: Very thorough and well researched and willing to challenge assumptions. He is the kind of historian who, even if you disagree with his assessment, you respect, because he obviously did his research and isn’t just writing from preconception, or twisting evidence to suit an agenda.

I’m familiar withe passage from Livy you speak of (39.8-19). Interestingly, the alleged mention by Tacitus of Christianity uses very similar language, as though only the name of the offenders has been changed. Livy uses the term superstitio when referring to the Bacchic celebrants; being the fussy old traditionalist, he saw them as excessive and irrational.

Walter Burket (Greek Religion makes a sensible observation about the Bacchic cult:

The form of Bacchic initiation probably varied a great deal from group to group, and from period to period, with the extent of these variations stretching from outdoor picnics to an existential turning-point in life, from sublime symbolism to downright orgies.

Of course, we cannot say no orgy ever occurred in the Roman empire but we have to remember that even ancient historians had agendas. Suetonius said some awful things about the emperors, as did Tacitus, but these men were of the senatorial class and hated the emperors for hoarding the power they desired for their class. They were only too ready to slander. We can’t know how much of what Livy said is even true, given his own agenda as an arch-conservative. Some historians simply repeat everything an ancient historian has to say, which to my mind is as bad as Christian scholars simply repeating verbatim the contents of the Bible as though it is history. These folks seldom bother to look at the context, and context is everything.

But the point Christian critics fail to make in all this is the Roman reaction to such activities: disapproval. All apologists do is focus on is the alleged act itself, not the Roman reaction to it, which is no different from a Christian reaction.

Now Paul’s congregations, on the other hand, we know were committing some pretty egregious offenses sexually based on Paul’s own testimony. So far as I know, no Bacchic cultist has left a similar memoir to inform us as to what really took place at those gatherings.

Remember too, the cult of Bacchus was not one of the “traditional cults” and being new, was distrusted and looked upon with suspicion as threatening to Roman virtues and morals.

Finally, Laurence makes another observation worthy of consideration (Roman Passions, 92):

There are paintings of dinner parties in Pompeii, notably in the House of the Chaste Lovers. For one modern commentator these are ‘implausible’, due their sheer scale of luxury, and the lack of covering of the male body leads her to conclude that the scene is soon to ‘degenerate into a bona fide orgy’. But the connection between dining and sex made by this reviewer reflects more on how we in the twenty-first century view these images of Romans eating. This view has been shaped by film and the representation of degenerate Romans stuffing their faces, being sick and then stripping off for an orgy.

We have to understand too that many sex acts we take for granted revolted Romans, and that they have a very different view of sex and sexuality. A woman was one who was penetrated. A man was one who did the penetrating. If a man was penetrated, either anally or orally, it was a scandal and a reflection upon his manhood. For example, a cunnilinctor “a man whose mouth was for the Romans in effect penetrated by the woman” is seen by Galen to be “even more revolting than the fellator and cunnilingus is associated with old men, the impotent, and the castrated eunuch” (Laurence, 79). Hard to imagine a good old fashioned orgy without these activities but we’re supposed to believe they were commonplace, to judge from our Christian critics. Envy perhaps? Nobody has a more prurient fascination with sex than the repressed Christian, as they have repeatedly demonstrated for some twenty centuries now.

I am certain Laurence is himself addressing the mistaken idea of the commonplace Roman dinner orgy rather than isolated incidents (and remember too that monotheistic critics turn fertility priestesses into “temple prostitutes” many scholars think never existed). Orgies were not a was of life. Ancient morals were not inferior to our own. I think that is the main point to be made. There is no clear demarcation between a time of excess and a time of purity, as apologists like to pretend. Christianity did not improve the world as it did not improve humankind. If anything, from a Pagan perspective, it made the world a far worse place to live, a place filled with rampant superstition, fear of the divine, and rampant intolerance and hatred of the other. And let’s face it: if the Romans disapproved of some sexual activities they at least did not stone the poor bastards who engaged in it.