Turns out the Romans had a whole lot of names for sexual roles, and one's really taking off
These days, we’d call someone on the receiving side of gay sex a “bottom,” but ancient Rome had a whole host of words for that role, as social media users recently discovered.
A viral tweet included a screenshot of Wikipedia’s “Homosexuality in ancient Rome” article—specifically Amy Richlin’s research into sexual roles among Roman men.
As reported by Richlin, a professor in UCLA’s Department of Classics, the term “homosexuality” has no corresponding Latin word, and Romans did not distinguish same-sex sexual encounters from different-sex ones. But the term cinaedus is one of the words used by Romans to describe men who liked to be penetrated by other men, and it’s “just one of a large number of insulting terms used by non-cineaedi,” she added.
Richlin went on:
Here are some of the other names by which Romans called a sexually penetrated male: pathieus, exoletus, concubinus, spintria, puer (“boy”), pullus (“chick”), pusio, delicatus, mollis(“soft”), tener (“dainty”), debilis (“weak”), ejfeminatus, discinctus (“loose-belted”), morbosus(“sick”).
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