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NOTICE: The text here is based on spiritual channeling and should be regarded as fiction until proven otherwise. This is not based on historical literature and cannot be used in school projects and cannot be used to learn more about the Romans. Only for entertainment and imagination.
When I started to channel the Romans, I knew almost nothing about Ancient Rome, other than that they liked to war and they had slaves and they believed in the Greek gods. Their culture proved to be immensely different from mine. I grew up in Sweden where women are not only equal to men but almost a bit with the upper hand in the attempt that society makes to ensure that women are never left behind as inferior. Swedish women are brought up to be outspoken, even to the point where I today when I travel and live in other countries I find Swedish women to be vulgar and too loud. Swedish women are perfectly sexually liberated, we can have relations with whomever we want, we can use the birth control pill, and Swedish women are even entitled to abortions. We can vote, we can marry whomever we want, we can run for politics, join the military, and most Swedish women do not even marry their partners. In the Swedish household, it is often the man who cooks and cleans. Swedish women can be very butch, outspoken, loud and vulgar, and Swedish men are very soft and feminine, gentle and kind. So when I met the Ancient Roman men it was quite the culture shock.
At first I struggled with this culture shock. Roman men expect a woman to not speak to men. To not ask about politics or military. They regard women as children, as weak and mindless without opinions of their own. A woman is merely judged based on her father. When the Roman men look at me, it is only because they are studying my face to see if they might know a man whom I resemble and whom they know. A Roman man will marry a woman without any regard to her personality, her interests, her looks, her life story, as long as her father and men have settled on the arrangement of marriage. The wife is nothing but a tool to make sons, and the Roman man will have other lovers, often male ones, on the side as he pleases, and even has sex with the slaves, both men and women and boys as he likes.
A woman in Rome would never approach a man just for a chat. And so whenever I approach a Roman man, they all assume that I was of course sent to them by my slave owner from the harbor for a sexual encounter. When I ask them about politics or military I get nothing from them. They ask me who my father is, because who I am does not matter. Or, when I do or say things that in the Roman cultural system might be unseemly, they ask me if that would not bring shame to my father or mother, because, even my own shame from the things that I do, is not my own shame to keep or have. Because in Rome I have nothing, not even my own shame.
Some Roman men have become angered at me and wanted to strike at me (hit me with their hand over the face) and yelled at me to leave their house, notably Julius Caesar and Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, because their patience runs out with my foolishness as a woman. Others they are intrigued and seem more tolerant and enduring with my nonsense, such as Sulla. Others are simply from a humble background themselves and regard women better, such as Pompeius, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Nero, who all claim to have started out life in slave families. And yet others are more graceful, even with how they handle women, such as Aulus Vitellius, Vettius Valens, but those are the fine refined men who are also highly educated and elegant intellectuals who focused more on sciences such as astronomy or philosophy or law, and so education and science seems to eradicate contempt of women, and foster gender equality and human rights, even in the Roman world.
But since talking to the most brutal example of Roman masculine destructive power, the Roman soldier Plutarchus, I started to realize that what were first awkward culture shocks with the issue of gender, is actually a wealth and treasure because I have suddenly gotten very interested in the study of men's behavior. How could Rome foster men who did the unspeakable brutalities like Plutarchus, and Sweden fosters men who do the dishes and stay home from work to take care of their babies while their female partners go to work? What is a man? How malleable they are, and yet, what an immense danger lies in them, that can be awakened.
Not just how men behave in terms of whether they are gentle and compassionate toward other human beings, or if they are going to do the unmentionable brutalities and murders that the Romans were capable of, but their entire sexual behavior. Plutarchus teaches us a lot about the human, and the man. And so I have switched the initial confusion with the cultural shocks, into a deep fascination of the human male psyche. The Romans have so much to teach us about men.
You might wonder if the Roman women can also teach us about women? I would say rather not, as the Roman women seem to be a construct also by the men. However we learn a great deal more about women from the Ancient Egyptians. I channeled queen Cleopatra and learned that their entire religion was centered around the woman, even the world was the actual womb of a great woman, the river Nile a penis into her vagina, and male semen was considered the same thing as female breast milk. I will study the men in Romans, and women in Egyptians.
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