Sexualidades invisibles

Floor 1, Room 21, Showcase 21.4. Portrait of a woman

The sphere of female sexuality in Rome remains, as in Greece, relatively hidden and invisible in both iconographic and written sources. The Roman female citizen was expected, with few exceptions, to lead a discreet life, mostly within the domus, the family home, where all respectable female sexual practices were to be confined, following the social expectations of pudicitia or modesty. However, not only did female sexuality often break the boundaries of the domus, as told by various written sources, generally in a reproachful or satirical tone, but it is in the domus itself, away from public scrutiny, where we can suppose that Roman women developed various sexual and affective relationships that have left hardly any explicit traces in the documentary or archaeological record.

Female homoeroticism is a particularly difficult area to study due to the extreme scarcity of sources. However, we do have some references to eroticism between women. For example, although from a negative perspective, Martial speaks of Philaenis, a woman who desired other women and had relations with them, while the festivities of the Bona Dea described by Juvenal have sometimes been interpreted as a female homoerotic celebration. The tribades or women having sexual relations with each other are also discussed in works such as the Fables of Phaedrus or the Controversies of Seneca the Rhetorician, where they are presented as elements of satire and caricature. In iconography, scenes of sex between women are extremely rare, but not non-existent. We do know, for example, of a few lamps with images of oral sex between women, as well as a few paintings.

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