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But even though Licht was writing in the licentious atmosphere of Weimar Germany, on the subject of Ancient Greek womanhood and masturbation he was still careful only to mention their ‘mysterious conduct', and a characteristic form of Ancient Greek leather-based dildo, known as
olisbos
, as depicted in many vase paintings, as well as references in
Lysistrata
to women lusting after them. Women described, however elliptically, in Ancient Greek literature as using
olis-hos
are often portrayed as wearing the things out in frustration.

Licht writes of a bowl in the British Museum in his time showing a contented-looking naked woman with two
olisboi
in her hand. Similar items were held by the Louvre and the Berlin Museum, which also had a vase showing a woman douching after use of the
olisbos
. Lucian and Plutarch write about a Lesbos full of
olisbos
-wielding lesbians, including Sappho, who in her own work describes one of her solo orgasms, obtained (after due prayer to Aphrodite) during a sexually fallow patch:

When I but glance at thee, no word from my dumb

lips is heard

My tongue is tied, a subtle flame

Leaps in a moment o'er my frame
,

I see not with mine eyes, my ear can only murmurs hear
,

Sweat dews my brow, quick tremors pass

Through every limb, more wan than grass

I blanch, and frenzied, nigh to death
,

I gasp away my breath
.

Dildo-making became a specialised commercial cottage industry around 500 BC in one particular city, Miletus, in Ionia. Miletus
olisboi
, which were exported across the Greek world, were manufactured by shoemakers from wood and padded leather, and were designed to be used with olive oil for lubrication. The shoemakers' skill was to sew the kid leather carefully so the stitches would not hurt women users.

The
olisbos
was used by both heterosexual women and lesbians, or
tribads
as they were known. The device was used either alone in privacy, or communally by two or more women together. A passage in Lucian's
Erotes
alludes to the latter use. A character called Charicles, who is outraged by the
olisbos
, complains about ‘the invention of such shameless instruments, the monstrous imitation made for unfruitful love, lest a woman embrace another woman as a man would do; let that word which hitherto so rarely reaches the ear – I am ashamed to
mention it – let tribadic obscenity celebrate its triumphs without shame.'

In other works, there is less implicit criticism of the practice. The third-century BC writer, Herondas, in
The Two Friends, or Confidential Talk
, describes how the friends discuss their
olishoi
without embarrassment. The play's complicated, gossipy and always risqué storyline would be far from out of place in a modern
Sex and the City
episode – or at an Ann Summers party.

Just as, in the modern world, we have bought a bit too readily into the idea of the dreamy, philosophical Greeks as out-and-out hedonists, we have cleaved a little too much to the notion of the technically savvy, sophisticated Romans as sexually a bit perverted and debauched. The situation is similar in many ways to how perceptions might be a few hundred years from now of twenty-first-century Britain and the US. From the evidence of contemporary popular culture, it could appear that old-fashioned Britain is rather refined in sexual matters, while technically advanced America, home of 90 per cent of Internet pornography, is brash, sexy and liberated. In practice, however, America is in many ways more modest and prudish about sex than the UK.

Rome had always been a city where prostitution flourished, fed by the ravenous orgasmic appetites of its men and women. According to a 1920s English scholar, W. C. Firebaugh, who is thought to have coined the expression that prostitution is ‘the oldest profession', there was a complex grading system for prostitutes, and the women who practised this calling were by no means all from the lower levels of society.

The highest grade were the
Delicatae
, the kept women of the wealthy and prominent men, the direct equivalent of the Greek
hetairai
. Next down were
Famosae
, daughters and even wives of wealthy families who simply enjoyed sex for its own sake. Next came the well-respected
Meretrix
, the career, paid harlot;
Prosedae
, who waited in front of their brothel for passing trade,
Nonariae
, night walkers forbidden to appear before
the ninth hour,
Mimae
, mime actresses, who were invariably prostitutes on the side,
Cymhalistriae
, cymbal players,
Ambubiae
(singers) and
Citharistriae
(harpists) who also moonlighted as prostitutes.

Further down still were the
Scortum
, whom Firebaugh defined merely as ‘common strumpets',
Scorta erratica
, peripatetic, travelling strumpets who walked the street,
Busturiae
, who hung around funerals to service miserable mourners,
Copae
, bar maids who could be hired for the night by travellers as bedmates and from who we get the word ‘copulation' as well as the still less delicate ‘copping off,
Doris
, harlots of particular beauty who worked naked,
Lupae
, ‘she wolves' known for the peculiar wolf-like cry they uttered when they came, or pretended to come, to orgasm, or alternatively for their tonguing skills (remember how a she-wolf licked Romulus and Remus better when she found and nursed them).

At the bottom of this substantial heap were
Aelicariae
, girls in bakers' shops, which were generally regarded as brothels, particularly where phallus-shaped cakes were sold (the
Aelicariae
would slip clients in when the bread was in the
fornix
– the oven – from whence comes our word ‘fornicate'),
Noctiluae
, another grade of night walker,
Blitidae
, lower-class bar girls who got their name from a cheap drink sold in the tavern where they worked,
Forariae
, country girls who frequented highways,
Gallinae
, prostitutes prone to steal your wallet (so named after hens because of their propensity take anything and scatter everything),
Diobolares
– girls who would have sex for the bargain price of just two obols,
Amasiae
, enthusiastic amateurs whose reward was sexual pleasure alone, and finally, the bargain basement
Quadrantariae
, the lowest grade of all, whose charms were no longer merchantable.

So evidence of the Romans' debauchery is not exactly lacking, yet it is easily forgotten that same civilisation did also advance further than the Greeks ever did the cause of equitable marriage and the more equal distribution of orgasmic pleasure between the sexes. Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic
of the first century AD, indeed, created the modern marital ideal seized upon later by Christianity. To paraphrase his words, Musonius's idea was that marriage should be a communion of souls with a view to producing children. With his strict ethical doctrine came a then rare sexual equality, with neither partner being allowed to have sex outside wedlock or before marriage. It was as a result of Musonius's beliefs that in the fourth-century AD, adultery was made punishable by a fine. On the other hand, the revenue from this taxation was so great that the state was able to build a temple to Venus with it.

But there are many examples too, as evidence of the novel Roman concept of Mr and Mrs Right, the perfect partners, of married couples putting up their own heterosexual erotic domestic sculptures. On the Roman-owned Aegean island of Delos there is a statue in a Roman house of a married couple locked together symbolically, part of the same piece of stone. What is most striking about this is that the statue was erected and paid for by the wife. More generally, too, in the Roman world, the matriarch was a commonplace figure, and one inconceivable to the Greeks. Middle-class and noble women seen in Pompeii frescoes give every impression of enjoying quite remarkable equality with their menfolk.

It is true to say that some of the old Greek fear of female sexuality pervaded Roman society also. Pliny believed women's sexual feelings such a threat that he advocated dousing them by applying to the labia mouse droppings, snail excrement and ‘blood taken from the ticks on a wild black bull' – a combination that must have quenched both female and male lust. Juvenal in his
Satires
complained: ‘And remember, there's nothing these women won't do to satisfy their ever-moist groins: they have just one obsession – sex.'

But Roman sex manuals betray a more modern, less misogynist view of women. They portray the female orgasm as something all men should strive for, even if Ovid, in his first-century AD
Ars Amatoria
, does not quite strike the tone of a modern
Cosmopolitan
article. ‘Use force. Women like forceful men,' writes the poet. ‘They often seem to surrender unwillingly when they are really anxious to give in. When you find the spot where a woman loves to be touched, don't be too shy to touch it … You'll see her eyes sparkle … She'll moan and whisper sweet nothings and sigh contentedly … But be careful that you don't gallop ahead, leaving her behind. And make sure that she doesn't reach the finish before you do.'

The fairest assessment of Roman sex is that it was a bit of a mixed bag. Venus, the goddess of love, appears in Roman life simultaneously as the guardian of honourable marriage, the matriarch of the Roman nation, the patroness of prostitutes – and the persuader-in-chief against licentiousness.

No appraisal of Roman society can be complete without a voyage round the more grotesque manifestations of the Roman male's lust for exotic orgasmic delights. The Romans' predilection for a high-octane sexual thrill may go back to the
Bacchanalia
tradition that originated in the far south of Italy and moved northwards. The
Bacchanalia
festivals, a debased form of the Greeks'
Dionysia
, were a distasteful hive of violence, high emotion and sex, in that order.

The immediate ancestors of the Romans celebrated marriage with a wedding orgy in which all the husband's friends had intercourse with the bride first, in the presence of witnesses. This is thought to be a survival of a so-called state of ‘free prostitution' that preceded marriage in earlier times in which the idea of stable-coupledom was unknown. ‘Natural and physical laws are alien and even opposed to the marriage-tie,' wrote Otto Kiefer in his 1934
Sexual Life in Ancient Rome
. ‘Accordingly, the woman who is entering marriage must atone to Mother Nature for violating her, and go through a period of free prostitution, in which she purchases the chastity of marriage by preliminary unchastity.'

Such practices may have co-existed with the
Bacchanalia
. But by the time of Rome's greatest influence,
Bacchanalia
was no longer regarded as a good thing. The historian Livy
explained how more discerning later Romans thoroughly disapproved of the occasions: ‘After the rites had become open to everybody, so that men attended as well as women, and their licentiousness increased with the darkness of night, there were no shameful or criminal deed from which they shrank. The men were guilty of more immoral acts among themselves than the women. Those who struggled against dishonour, or were slow to inflict it on others, were slaughtered in sacrifice like brute beasts. The holiest article of their faith was to think nothing a crime.'

Such orgiastic behaviour, according to the historian of the orgy, Burgo Partridge, ‘became, not a purgative, but a habit-forming drug'. The corrosive Nature of
Bacchanalia
was not lost on Roman legislators, however. Some 7,000 people were prosecuted for taking part in them, many of whom were put to death. A decree issued by the Senate in 186 BC finally outlawed them. Nero's tutor Seneca was moved by such excesses to state that, ‘pleasure is a vulgar thing, petty and unworthy of respect, common to dumb animals'. Yet the spirit of the
Bacchanalia
survived in the sex lives of many of the emperors, Nero notably included.

Of the Emperor Galba, we learn from Seutonius: ‘He was very much given to the intercourse between men, and amongst such he preferred men of ripe age,
exoletes.' (Pedicon
was the Latin name for ‘a man who exercises his member in the anus'. He was also called a pederast or drawk. The man ‘who allows himself to be invaded in this way' was called the cinede
(cinae-dus)
. If the cinede was ‘worn out', and hence a looser fit, he was called an
exolete
. Domitian enjoyed heterosexual sex more. He described it as ‘bed wrestling'. One of his favourite pre-bout activities was personally depilating his concubines to assist them achieve the pubic hairstyle of the time, which was for women to remove everything by either plucking or singeing.

The Emperor Augustus was the originator of strict and civilising Roman marriage laws, yet he, too, was pretty dissolute. He once instructed the wife of an ex-consul to attend him in
his bedroom and sent her back to her husband's dining room, visibly flushed and with hair ruffled, leaving little to the imagination as to what had occurred. Augustus also got his wife to help him procure virgins.

Tiberius forbade the execution of virgins so that when such women were condemned to death, they would have to suffer the extra humiliation of being publicly deflowered by the executioner just before the sentence was carried out. Of Tiberius, Burgo Partridge, using Suetonius as principal source, writes: ‘At his retreat in Capri he devised an apartment with seats and couches in it, and “adapted to the secret practice of abominable lewdness”, where he entertained companies of girls and catamites who he called
Spintriae
and who defiled one another in his presence
triplici serie conexi
in order to arouse his flagging powers … In the Blue Grotto he swam like an old shark amongst a shoal of naked little boys, of an age when “they were already fairly strong but had not yet been weaned”. These he called “his little fishes” and trained them to play between his thighs while he was bathing. The children were encouraged to suck on his penis as if it were a nipple.'