Both parents contribute seeds to conceive the child. The nature (natura) and sex of the child are determined by the proportion of paternal and maternal seeds in the mix that triggers conception, by whether the father's seed has come from his right or left testicle, and by the part of the uterus (left or right) in which the male parent's seed has fallen.

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If male seed from the father flows into the left or female part of the mother's uterus, a male is conceived, but feminine characteristics will dim its "masculine splendor." The male child will have beautiful features, too white skin, delicate limbs, short stature, a soft voice, a weak mind, or several of these.

Vice versa, if female seed from the father lodges in the right or masculine part of the uterus, a female results, but the child will exhibit more masculine traits than normal sexual differentiation allows, to wit, strong limbs, excessive height, facial hair, a low voice, an unlovely countenance, a daring spirit, or several of these.

But when the father's male seed flows into the right half of the mother's uterus and his female seed into the left, the two fetuses will be normal, the one possessing the beauty proper to the nature of women and the other the manly strength (robur virile) of mind and body proper to males.

The Astrologers

To explain sexual preference, the Romans relied as much on their astrologers as on their physicians.

The permutations of the starry map make us chaste or unchaste, faithful or promiscuous, libidinous or frigid, sterile or fertile, attractive or off-putting, unbridled or moderate in our sexual practice, active or passive, inclined to sex only with women, or only with boys, or with both women and boys, or only with young men, or with males of any age, or with slaves, or with our nearest relatives, or with prostitutes.

The most comprehensive surviving Latin astrological treatise is the Matheseos libri octo of Firmicus Maternus. When he began it in 334 C.E. he was a wealthy retired lawyer of the senatorial class. His sources range from Hellenistic times to the recent past. We may safely take his views to represent a conceptualization and explanation of sexual variation widely shared both in his own day and in earlier centuries.

Firmicus pays almost no attention to men who desire only women nor to women who desire only men; these inclinations of desire are too ordinary, in his view, to require explanation. He concentrates on the non-procreative sexual drives.

His taxonomy of sexual types includes a class of adult males who are exclusive pederasts. Such men are sterile, they never marry, and they are incapable of sexual acts with women, even when they are randiest. They are always (semper) lovers of boys. They are furiously and unnaturally (Firmicus signals his disapproval) given to anal intercourse.

Corresponding to the men who have sex exclusively with boys is a class of women who love and have sex exclusively with women. He calls them "mannish women" (viragines, mulieres viragines). They never (numquam) couple sexually with men, for if "the Sun and Moon are in masculine signs and Venus is also in a masculine sign in a woman's chart, women will be born who take on a man's character and desire intercourse with women in the manner of men."

Firmicus, like Ptolemy before him, recognizes all the commoner inflections of sexual taste. For example: "If Mercury and Venus are in conjunction in the 19th degree of Aries, they make the natives impure of mouth" (inpuros ore=fellators). Saturn in aspect with Venus in any way "will make the natives molles, cinaedos, men who give themselves to slavish acts." It is the celestial ambient that produces professional and amateur prostitutes, even lesbian prostitutes (mulieres vero viragines meretrices).

But what is most useful for us to retain from the ancient theorists is a renewed sense of the range of sexual categories available to Romans, of the elasticity and variety their sexual tastes, and of the candor with which they report and picture their sexual acts.

Ancient Greek and Roman art represents a variety of homoerotic experience in several different ways.

The Greco-Roman myths concerning same-sex love have been of crucial importance to the Western gay and lesbian literary heritage, both as texts and as icons.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

In ancient Rome, the galli were castrated priests of Cybele, the Asian Mother Goddess, and of the Syrian goddess Atagartis; they were widely riducled for their effeminacy, cross-dressing, and sexual passivity.

Pederasty is the erotic relationship between an adult male and a boy, generally one between the ages of twelve and seventeen, in which the older partner is attracted to the younger one who returns his affection.

Roman writers on homosexual or bisexual themes generally followed Greek models; but unlike the Greeks, Romans condoned sex with slaves.

First used to refer only to anal intercourse, sodomy was progressively defined by the Church Fathers, and many later lawmakers, to include all sexual acts that could not result in procreation.

Although same-sex friendships played a more important role in his emotional and personal life than relationships with women, his hostility to all forms of nonprocreative sexuality caused Augustine to condemn homosexuality.

The Roman poet Catullus incorporated homoerotic themes in his verse, both reflecting the passionate character of same-sex friendships and describing several of his own homosexual adventures.

In his highly accomplished and influential poetry, Horace reflects the easy bisexuality of the Roman upper class in the first century B. C.

The works of satirist Juvenal are crucial for exploring attitudes toward (homo)sexuality in ancient Rome.

Verses from two epistles of the Apostle Paul shaped the attitudes of Christianity toward male and female homosexuality.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.

Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.