The Ancient "Hotwife" Culture Who Loved Wife-Swapping

What the Romans had to say about the Etruscans leads us to believe they loved some familiar erotic dynamics.

Etruscan Boccanera Plaques from Cerveteri in the British Museum London; Public Domain

This profound resignation makes you mine forever. I intend, tomorrow, to treat you to an orgy of delights, to make all your senses boil. I want you to behold me in pleasure’s throes; and I want to behold you in them; and when we are both very merry and very high from lewd sights and lewd doings, you shall be given the venom that is to put an end to the abhorrent existence of that contemptible creature I failed to avoid bringing into this world.

 — Marquis de Sade; Juliette

A curious distortion happens when we look back on our distant past as a species, and a tendency to whitewash history flows naturally from us as readily as we intuit the sweetness of sugar or the bitterness of pure cocoa. 

When we think of our parents or grandparents, we tend to think of them as asexual stoics belonging more to polite society than kinky bedrooms.

Yet, we know that for us to be here, sex must’ve transpired between them at some point.

Truthfully, there’s been a long arch of erotic trends that has spanned for millennia. As Abrahamic religions rose, sex was smitten by the iron fists of rulers, kings, and the Church. Now those religions have receded, and human sexuality is finally beginning to flourish again. For most people, it feels like we’re finally able to take our first full breath in centuries. And now, thanks to anthropological discoveries and the power of science, we can understand our ancestors and ancient cultures in a more intimate light. 

It turns out they aren’t so different from us. If you held up ancient descriptions of human sexuality to contemporary human sexuality, you’d have many more similarities than differences. Ancient porn and modern porn are strikingly similar.

One place this is especially true is with the Ancient Etruscans.

Ancient Mediterranean Cultures

Ancient Mediterranean cultures liked to drink and have sex—a lot of it. In this, the prudish Romans were quite the exception. They were a hypermasculine culture that didn’t even give women their own names. Women took the feminized version of their family name. She was named in relation to her husband.

When the Romans encountered the Ancient Greeks, they were astonished at what they saw as “naked people playing all the time” and having drunken, sexually-charged festivals. The Greeks were somewhere in the middle when it came to sexual liberation. They weren’t anywhere near as strict as the patriarchal Romans. In Roman society, a man could kill his wife, which wasn’t even a crime.

The Etruscans were the polar opposite. They revered women.