X-Rated Roman Lamps Fuel a Publishing Quandary

Tough decisions about printing X-rated pictures don’t often confront Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

The magazine typically publishes articles of archeological import illustrated by pictures of ancient ruins, potsherds and dusty digs. But recently Shanks, the founding editor of the 16-year-old bimonthly, had to decide what to do with some unusually tangy erotica unearthed from an ancient Mediterranean city: fragments of 1,800-year-old oil lamps depicting scenes of sexual intercourse as well as what the magazine calls sodomy and pederasty.

“The Romans no doubt thought the lamps sexually titillating and perhaps even arousing,” said Lawrence E. Stager, the Harvard archeologist who wrote the series on the civilization of Ashkelon, the port city where the shards were found six years ago.

But the question facing Shanks was more vexing: What would readers of Biblical Archaeology Review think about the lamps? Would they too be aroused--in anger?

So Shanks, whose Washington-based magazine reaches 175,000 subscribers, put the question to his readers last winter. Publish? Don’t publish? Or publish--on a perforated page, for easy home editing of objectionable material?

About 700 readers took the trouble to write in. The unscientific--and decidedly broad-minded--poll results were: Publish, 50%; don’t publish, 20%; publish and perforate, 30%.

Adding the responses to the first and third options for a commanding 80% total, Shanks had the mandate to publish four naughty lamp scenes, which appear in the July-August issue.

The text accompanying what Shanks calls his “dirty pictures” is the last in Stager’s three-part series on the succeeding civilizations of this busy hub in ancient Palestine. It goes on to describe a boy emperor of the Roman Empire, Elagabalus, who was “an ardent bisexual. He frequently made the rounds of public baths of Rome, sizing up prospective male lovers.” It was, Stager says, “a clear violation of the ‘macho’ code for Roman males.”

In setting the context for these lamps--which were, puzzlingly, never lit--Stager reassures readers that “the erotic lamps from Ashkelon probably belonged to a Greco-Roman household, rather than to a Jewish or Christian household.” But the scholar also says that similar lamps have been found all over the Roman world, even in Jerusalem, and that a “double standard” applied to the sexual activities of males.

“Little or no stigma was attached to sexual affairs before or during marriage, whether with males or females,” he wrote. “It was socially acceptable, for example, for young bachelors, or a married man and a young bachelor, to have sex together.”