Roman sexual permissiveness belonged to free men alone: they could use male and female slaves and children at will, while being penetrated was a disgrace. Early Christians fused the Jewish ban on extramarital sex with Roman monogamy to invent male fidelity, and legislated for the first time to protect women forced into prostitution.
The popular picture has classical Antiquity tolerant about sex until puritanical Christianity crushed it. Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin takes that picture apart: it is not wholly wrong, but it omits so much that the conclusion flips.
The licence ran only to free men
Roman sexual freedom had a hard gate. A free man could have sex with male and female slaves and with prostitutes, children included, entirely lawfully. The going price was about a loaf of bread, and enslaved prostitution was everywhere. A husband's extramarital sex was no fault at all, merely personal taste, and most men would today be called bisexual.
The other side of that licence: being penetrated was shameful. A law known only from later references, the Lex Scantinia, punished both free men and boys who were penetrated and men who consented to it — the latter called semivir, 'half man'. Rome's supposed tolerance of homosexuality was a licence for free men to penetrate the unfree. Women, meanwhile, were required to be virgins at marriage and faithful after it; in the Greek-speaking provinces many wore face veils in public.
Christians invented male fidelity
Christianity overturned nearly all of it: sex within marriage was grudgingly allowed, extramarital sex condemned outright. A man could have only one wife, but Judaism allowed several; combine the ban on extramarital sex with monogamy and you get the novel idea that a man too should be faithful to one woman.
The early Christians knew they were innovating. John Chrysostom said most people think adultery means only violating a married woman, but a man with a wife who goes to a prostitute or a slave girl commits it too. Pelagius observed that the laws were made by men and lean against women.
The law reached women forced into sex
On slavery, Christians mostly accepted the institution; Gregory of Nyssa, the first recorded abolitionist, is the great exception. But in 428 the Empire forbade pimps, fathers and slave-owners from selling women for involuntary sex, sending offenders to the mines, and let free women driven to prostitution by poverty appeal to bishops, judges or municipal officials. On desire itself, though, the early Christians were the austere fanatics of legend, holding it intrinsically sinful.
Why it matters
The romantic gloss on 'the ancients were open' misses what set the price: slave status. The real novelty was not looser rules but moving moral standing from social rank to the person — a move still deciding whose body counts.
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