Laudator Temporis Acti

Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 67-68, with note on p. 272:

Given the vagaries of survival, the most representative artifact of Roman eroticism is the humble lamp. Small, ceramic, and produced in truly innumerable quantities, lamps survive across the centuries. The culture where sex was supposedly reduced to sexual fumbling in the dark is the same culture that has left, in rather startling abundance, lamps decorated with the most uninhibited exertions. Lamps assure us that erotic art was not the preserve of the elite alone. The sheer numbers and archaeological findspots of erotic-themed lamps, furthermore, militate against the suggestion that these artifacts were anything other than a basic and broadly diffused domestic instrument. Sex — along with mythology, the animal kingdom, and the world of public entertainments — provided one of the most inexhaustible sources of decoration; the standard study of the huge collection of Italian lamps in the British Museum suggests that sex may have provided the very most common theme. The range and inclusiveness of the erotic repertoire suggests that myth, fantasy, and farce were exuberantly mingled. Modern studies conventionally divide the erotic lamps into two classes: Erotes (depictions of Eros) and symplegmata ("embracings" — a sort of learned prudery). This division does not adequately capture the range and meaning of different erotic motifs. The figure of Eros himself, symbol of joy and life, was unfailingly popular; though our eyes may be desensitized to the power of such a mythological commonplace, in Roman culture, where sexual passion was an immanent divine force, the blending of spirituality and sensuality ought not be discounted. The symplegmata lamps present the most varied images. Some are mythological, such as Zeus (qua swan) and Leda. Others are perhaps allegorical, such as the scenes of women with horses (which, maybe, refer to the Ass legend; the scenes of men with donkeys are probably not so easily rescued into decency). Some have a theme that is perhaps comic, perhaps poignant, perhaps mocking: the popular motif of the old man watching a couple perform feats of love. There are some same-sex pairings, and some elaborate sexual positions, but these are all rare. Mostly what the lamps depict is one man and one woman on a bed — sometimes beneath a canopy, sometimes with a lamp in the background — joined in carnal embrace.⁸⁹

89. In general, Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking, 250– 254; on the popularity of erotic themes, see, e.g., Donald M. Bailey, A Catalogue of Lamps in the British Museum, vol. 2 (London, 1980), 64; Annalis Leibundgut, Die römischen Lampen in der Schweiz: Eine Kultur- und handelsgeschichtliche Studie (Bern, 1977), for a focused study; for the relative rarity of same-sex conjunctions and oral sex, see Bailey, Catalogue, 64–65.

Lamp at Römisch-Germanische Museum, Cologne