The Ancient Romans were definitely not prudish about sex, but their ideas about when the act was healthy and when it wasn’t are certainly foreign to moderns. The first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder wrote that “sexual intercourse is good for lower back pain, for weakness of the eyes, for derangement, and for depression”. On the other hand, Pliny thought that “it is better to have sexual intercourse infrequently.” There was an idea that men who abstained from sex were “more robust and bigger than men and lead healthier lives . . . ” (Soranus).
Correspondingly, medicines existed to turn men on or off, depending on what you wanted. A popular aphrodisiac was the ground up carcass of a blister beetle, called a “Spanish fly”, which made a substance called “cantharidin”. Unfortunately, even though it could lead to feelings of warmth and swelling of the genitals, cantharidin is also super toxic, as recent studies have stated. No scientific scholarship is needed to explain the antaphrodisiac made by the gall of an electric eel, which, smeared on the genitalia, terminates the desire for sex.
Source(s): @healthline, “What is Spanish fly, exactly?”, Adrienne Santos-Longhurst, July 16, 2019. _American Entomologist_, vol 48 number 4, p. 215, “A world view of insects as aphrodisiacs, with special reference to Spanish fly,” by D.A. Prischmann and C.A. Sheppard. Pp 88-89, _A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities_, J.C. McKeown, OUP 2017.
