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throughout history – for example the relationships between boys and older men tolerated in the Roman Empire would be illegal today. This section also shows how many of our modern pleasures and leisure activities have their origins in ancient religion: tobacco smoking and some of the earliest team sports were elements in elaborate rituals when they are first countered, in the Americas. In the Roman empire, pepper became a marker not just of wealth, but of ostentatious refinement that some feared would bankrupt the state. In China a painting carried on its surface the record of those who over generations enjoyed its rarified message of how a lady should behave.

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Warren Cup

Vessel, probably found at Bittir, near Jerusalem

AD 5–15

Two thousand years ago, the elite members of great empires like that of Rome were not solely concerned with power and conquest. Like all elites they also found time for pleasure, and art. This object incorporates both. It is a silver cup made in Palestine, in about AD 10. Before coming to the British Museum it had been in the collection of the wealthy American Edward Warren (who commissioned the most famous version of Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss), and it tells us almost as much about twentieth-century attitudes to sex as about Roman ones.

The Warren Cup shows scenes of sexual coupling between adult men and adolescent boys. This 2,000-year-old piece of Roman silverware is a goblet that looks as though it would hold a pretty large glass of wine. It’s in the shape of a modern sporting trophy, standing on a small base, and it would once have had two handles, though these are now lost. You can see at once that this is a work of supreme craftsmanship. The scenes on the cup are in relief, created by beating out the silver from the inside. It must have been used at private parties, and given the subject matter it would certainly have commanded the admiration and the attention of everybody present.

Lavish eating and drinking were among the key rituals of the Roman world. Throughout the empire, Roman officials and local bigwigs would use banquets to oil the wheels of politics and business and show off wealth and status. Roman women were generally excluded from events such as the drinking parties where our cup would have been found, and we can probably assume that it was intended for a party with an all-male guest list.

Imagine a man arriving at a grand villa near Jerusalem somewhere around the year 10. Slaves lead him through to an opulent dining area, where he reclines with the other guests. The table is laid with silver platters and ornate vessels. This is the context in which our cup would have been passed around among the guests. On it two scenes of male love-making are set in a sumptuous private house. The lovers are depicted on draped couches similar to the ones the guests at our imaginary dinner party would be lounging on. And you can see a lyre and pipes waiting to be played as the participants settle to their sensual pleasures. The Classical historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes elaborates:

The cup depicts two varieties of a homosexual act. On the front there is an older man – we know he’s older because he has a beard; sitting astride him is a very handsome young man. It’s all very vigorous and virile, very realistic – it isn’t an idealized view of homosexuality. But if you look round the back there is a more standard portrayal of homosexuality. It shows two very beautiful young men – we know that they’re young because they have locks of hair hanging down their backs. One is lying on his back, and the slightly older man is looking away. It’s a lot more lyrical, a rather idealized view of what homosexuality was.

Although the homosexual scenes on the cup are ones that today strike us as explicit – some might say shocking and taboo – homosexuality was very much part of Roman life. But it was a complicated part, tolerated but not entirely accepted. The standard Roman line on what was admissible in same-sex coupling is neatly summarized by the Roman playwright Plautus in his