Those Aren’t Togas All The Way Down
What Roman Soldiers Were Wearing Under Their Togas Will Destroy Your Entire Understanding of Pre-Christian Morality
It’s 244 CE. The Roman Emperor is a Syrian. He just banned prostitution across the empire. Eleven years earlier, his predecessor (also pagan, also Syrian) appointed twelve officials specifically tasked with enforcing “moral decency in public and private life.” Bathhouses that used to let men and women bathe together naked? Now Gender-segregated by imperial decree. This the third emperor in a century to try enforcing it.
Jesus won’t be the state religion for another 68 years.
Here’s the common story you’ve probably heard: Rome was basically one extended bathhouse orgy where everyone was tastefully nude and living a hedonistic freewheeling lifestyle that would make a modern bushwick hipster weep with envy, and then Christianity showed up and suddenly everyone had to wear seventeen layers of wool for modesty and women had to veil and develop complex neuroses about their own bodies. The sequel to Caligula except directed by an evangelical youth pastor.
Clean villain. Simple narrative. Satisfying arc from sexual abundance to repressive lack. The kind of story that lets you blame all of Western body-shame neurosis on one specific institution.
Except here’s the thing that should bother anyone who’s ever actually looked at the evidence: those aren’t togas all the way down. Those are modesty pants, a century before Jesus was born. The emperors issuing morality edicts? Pagan. The officials enforcing “decency in public and private life”? Appointed by a pagan emperor who worshipped multiple gods including Christ as philosophical curiosities. The sexual regulation legislation? Pre-Christian. The gender segregation in public spaces? Already being enforced by multiple emperors who never set foot in a church.
Which means at some point between “Caligula appointed his horse to the Senate” Rome and “Constantine saw a vision” Rome, something happened that nobody wants to talk about. The culture had already started getting weird about bodies in ways that can’t be blamed on Christian killjoys.
The periodization is wrong. The villain origin story is wrong. And the real story, the one with actual dates, actual laws, actual archaeological evidence, is significantly more uncomfortable than “Christians imported shame.”
Because what if Christianity didn’t transform Roman body politics at all? What if Rome had already been transformed….by something else?
