A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [94]
The other side of the cup shows two youths
So if you wanted to show sex between men and youths who weren’t slaves, it made sense to look back to the age of Classical Greece, where it was normal for older men to teach younger boys about life in general, in a mentoring relationship that included sex. The early Roman Empire had idealized Greece and adopted much of its culture, and the cup shows what is clearly a Greek scene. Is this a Roman sexual fantasy of a Classical Greek male coupling? Perhaps by placing it in a Greek past any moral discomfort is put at a safe distance, while adding to the titillation of the forbidden and exotic. And perhaps everybody believes that the best sex happens somewhere else. Professor James Davidson, author of The Greeks and Greek Love, explains:
Although this cup looks back to the Classical period, the Greek vase painters, who were by no means prudish or modest when it came to depicting sex, nevertheless carefully avoided scenes of homosexual intercourse, at least penetrative intercourse. So the Romans are showing what couldn’t be shown 500 years earlier. The Greek world provided an alibi that allowed societies to think about homosexuality, to talk about homosexuality, to represent homosexuality, as it did from the eighteenth century onwards and even in the Middle Ages. It made it into a piece of art more than a piece of pornography.
There’s no doubt where these encounters are taking place. The musical instruments, the furniture, the clothes and the hairstyles of the lovers all point to the past – to the Classical Greece of several centuries earlier. Interestingly, we can tell from our cup that the two younger adolescents shown here were not slaves. The style of their haircuts, with a long lock trailing down the neck, is typical of freeborn Greek boys. Between 16 and 18, the hair would be cut and dedicated to the gods as part of the passage into manhood. So both the boys shown on the cup are free and from good families. But we can also see another figure, who might have been part of the Roman banquet at which the cup was used. He stands in the background, peeping at one of the scenes of love-making from behind a door – we only see half his face. He is clearly a slave, although it is impossible to know whether he is simply indulging in a bit of voyeurism or apprehensively responding to a call for ‘room service’. Either way, he’s a reminder that what he and we are witnessing are acts to be conducted only in private behind closed doors. Bettany Hughes comments:
In Rome there was a notion that you have good wives and that you should manage without resorting to male sex. But we know, from the poetry, from the laws, from the back-references to homosexual relations, that actually this was something that did happen throughout the Roman world. The Warren Cup is a good bit of exquisite hard evidence which proves that. This cup is telling us what actually went on, how homosexual activity was something which took place in high aristocratic circles.
A slave boy peers around the door to look at the lovers
Silver cups of this date are now exceptionally rare, as so many were melted down, and among the survivors few can match the virtuoso skill of the Warren Cup. To buy a cup like this you would have had to be rich, for it would have cost somewhere around 250 denarii – and for that money you could have bought twenty-five jars of the best wine, two thirds of an acre of land, or even an unskilled slave like the one we see peering round the door. So this indulgent little dining piece places its owner firmly in the echelons of high society, the world that St Paul eloquently condemned for its drunkenness and its fornication.
We don’t know for certain, but it’s thought that the Warren Cup was found buried near Bittir, a town a few miles south-west of Jerusalem. How it got to this location is a mystery, but we can make a guess. We can date the making of the cup