@Fausnaught Most Romans finished work at 6 p.m.? And what is your authoritative source for that? Everything we know about what “most” Romans did we know from the work of a handful of wealthy Roman historians who didn’t exactly go out and study or interview the man on the street. There are however, two different definitions of “Rome”. There is Rome the city and Rome the nation. Rome the nation fed Rome the city, and the majority of Romans in the nation were farmers because there wasn’t enough farming technology to enable a minority of people feed the majority. The majority of people in Rome the city may very well have not been farmers and been rich enough to practice the values that we generally associate with Rome, though I still doubt it was the majority. I have said nothing about how anyone felt, but yes I have made some assumptions about how poor farmers behaved because I know what it is to work hard and be tired at the end of the day, in spite of whatever sexual desires I have.
Now maybe you’re getting mad at me because you think I’m somehow putting down homosexuality, or just generally putting down multiple partners, or orgies, or whatever. I’m doing nothing of the sort. The biological fact is that men left to nature will get off on anything that sits still long enough, but that given a choice, the majority will choose a woman. I make no judgment about what’s right or wrong, just what happens and must have happened for the human race to be biologically successful.
It is not presumptuous to consider the possibility that our notion of what the Romans did two thousand years ago based on a historical record largely about the rich and powerful might not be the least accurate for the mass of people who made up the nation of Rome. What is presumptuous is to assume that everyone in the Roman Empire lived like the toga wearing elites we see in popular culture depictions of Rome and that suggesting that that might not be accurate is a “load of, well…”