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thoughts like ‘Take that!’ But many others use colorful sexual language to make the message of domination clear. This glans (the Latin word for ‘penis’ is the same as for ‘sling projectile’) from the war against Octavian, later Augustus, bears witness: ‘I seek Octavian’s ass’ (CIL 11.6721.7) is one of the daintier thoughts; all related to sexual penetration as emblematic of domination. This view of masculine domination as sexual metaphor comes straight from ordinary men.
    The magical papyri confirm this picture of aggressive male sexuality. Many of the charms and incantations are designed to subject women to men, sometimes in the grossest terms:
    Let the myrrh smoke on coals and recite the spell. ‘You are Zmyrna [i.e. myrrh], the bitter and effective one … Everyone calls you Zmyrna, but I call you Eater and Burner of the Heart … I am sending you to X, daughter of Y, to serve me against her and bring her to me. If she is sitting, she may not sit; if she is talking to someone, she may not talk; if she is approaching someone, she may not approach; … if she is eating, she may not eat; if she is kissing someone, she may not kiss … She may think only of me, desire me only, love me only, and fulfill my every wish … Enter her through her soul and remain in her heart and burn her entrails, her breast, her liver, her breath, her bones, her marrow, until she comes to me to love me and fulfill my every wish. I urge you, Zmyrna … to make sure that you carry out my orders. Just as I am burning you and you are potent, just so you must burn her brain, the woman I love, burn it completely and rip out her entrails and shed her blood, drop by drop, until she comes to me.’ (PGM 1:121–4/Luck)
    The violent imagery fits the aggressive, dominant male. And the action in the plays of Plautus, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and Petronius’ Satyricon all features males who are concerned about domination. These works also picture a world in which homosexual acts occur together with heterosexual, and in which the elite matrix of acceptable behavior seems to apply.
    Set alongside this clear concept of domination as the litmus test of masculinity and the resulting openness to acts of sexual domination, whether over males or females, is an equally clear concept that the collection of acts we might call nonstraightforward male-on-female intercourse is, as a group, considered unacceptable, not to say perverse or even deviant. Artemidorus is very specific about the view of sex that informs his dream interpretations; I assume that unless that view was widespread among ordinary people, this would not have been the case. As previously noted, his view is that there is one ‘natural’ sexual position:
    Basic Nature teaches men that the ‘body-to-body’ sexual position is the only natural one; all the other positions men are taught in their wantonness, licentiousness, and drunken follies. [After noting that animals all have their own ‘natural’ sexual habits, he continues.] And so it is appropriate that men hold the proper sexual position to be the ‘face-to-face’ one; the others are invented as suitable to lewdness and drunken excess. (Dreams 1.79)
    So Artemidorus states that ‘If the sun disappears this is a bad sign for all except for those endeavoring to escape notice and performing abominable acts (Dreams 1.36). But what exactly might those be? In his long series of interpretations based on dreams he mentions just about every possible sexual encounter and activity. He lists three general types: (1) intercourse that is natural, legal, and customary. This includes sex with one’s wife, with prostitutes, with ‘unknown women,’ with one’s own slaves, male or female, or with a female who is familiar and ‘on intimate terms’; (2) intercourse that is illegal: intercourse with a young (five- to ten-year-old) boy or girl; with one’s own son or daughter or sibling; with one’s mother; with a ‘friend’ (presumably, a