Nero was like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth.
Along its edge, Rome’s brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest street-walkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them, and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.
Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile.
While the body of a free-born Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. ‘It is accepted that every master is entitled to use his slave as he desires.’ Nero, by depriving the aristocratic women who worked at his parties of the inviolability that was theirs by right of law, was certainly – even if only for one night – making scandalous play with the Roman class system; but not with a far more fundamental proposition. In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.
In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both ejaculate and urinate.