Legal texts position to behaviors Romans wished to control or prohibit, without having necessarily reflecting what individuals actually did or refrained from undertaking. In the 2nd century Ad, "there is a growth in texts about intercourse in Greek and Latin," together with romance novels. Information about the sex lives of the Romans is scattered in historiography, oratory, philosophy, and writings on medication, agriculture, and other technical subject areas. But frank sexuality all but disappears from literature thereafter, and sexual subjects are reserved for professional medical composing or Christian theology. The mid-twentieth-century sexuality theorist Michel Foucault regarded sex during the Greco-Roman globe as governed by restraint and the artwork of controlling sexual satisfaction. While perceived effeminacy was denounced, in particular in political rhetoric, sexual intercourse in moderation with male prostitutes or slaves was not regarded as improper or vitiating to masculinity, if the male citizen took the lively and not the receptive role. In regular prenatal development, sexual intercourse organs originate from a widespread primordium during early gestation and differentiate into male or female sexes.
