Wroxeter Erotic Bowl
For over 100 years, an erotic bowl found by archaeologists at the Roman city of Wroxeter in Shropshire was tucked away on a shelf in a collection store. Its explicit male same-sex imagery was probably the reason why this rare artefact remained out of sight and largely unreported. This story is revealing both about Roman Britain and about the 20th-century society in which its archaeologist discoverer lived too.
The bowl is decorated with depictions of erotic encounters, which were clearly meant to be entertaining and titillating. While Roman pottery was occasionally adorned with erotic scenes, the particular male same-sex pairing on this bowl is unique.
Classical homoeroticism
The male couple depicted on the bowl are probably the mythical demi-god Hercules and Iolaos, his young shield bearer and charioteer. Hercules’ many sexual exploits with both women and men were a frequent subject in classical literature. Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and historian of the 1st century AD, includes Iolaos in his list of Hercules’ many sexual partners, and there are other depictions from antiquity of the two men together.
Relationships between an older, well-established man and his young aide were relatively common among the elite in classical antiquity. We can identify the figures here via some key attributes: Hercules is shown on the bowl as an older, muscular man wearing a protective headband for wrestling, while Iolaos, on the left, sports a recognisably Athenian helmet with a crest and cheek pieces.
The depiction of Hercules and Iolaos on the bowl is an indication of both its owner’s classical learning and presumably his sexual interests too.
Pottery in the city
Wroxeter was a surprisingly cosmopolitan place given its distance from other Roman cities in the south-east. It was located on Watling Street, the strategic artery established by the invading Roman army leading from the invasion port of Richborough in Kent to north-west Wales, a stronghold of the Iron Age Britons. The city had a range of key Roman facilities: a forum for administration and business, a vast public baths and a macellum (marketplace), as well as numerous temples.
The erotic bowl was excavated from a pit behind a sprawling townhouse of about AD 150, which had its own private bath house. The house was located in the city’s centre. A temple to Venus separated it from artisans’ homes and workshops on the same street. Excavations of the house found décor and expensive, imported goods that show the owner was very wealthy.
Decorated bowls like this erotic piece were expensive conversation pieces used at banquets. It is samian pottery, a glossy red fine ware manufactured on the continent, often decorated with lively figures which were made separately in small moulds and applied to the body of the vessels before firing. Samian ware was a prestige product that was hugely popular around the whole Roman empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
This bowl was made by the workshop of Libertus and Butrio in central Gaul – the best manufacturers working in this style at the time – and given its unusual subject, it may have been made to order.
Rituals
In the early years of civilian settlement at Roman Wroxeter, pots were often deposited into pits in back gardens, or occasionally put in under a new floor, as part of rituals that marked important events in people’s lives, like building a new house. The wealthy man who owned the bowl and commissioned the building of the large townhouse would have conducted just such a ritual, burying his bowl on completion of the building project.
The burying of complete pots and bowls, which probably originally contained food and drink, was a long-lived tradition probably introduced to Britain from Gaul. The pots were one of many types of offering that people in antiquity made to the gods.
The erotic bowl was discovered during excavations in the 20th century alongside 60 or more complete pots. The other pots were mainly coarse wares – everyday kitchen crockery – in forms used for eating and drinking such as beakers and bowls, which are the sort of pots normally used for this ritual. A few, however, were samian. And this one was especially distinctive.
Discovery and rediscovery
The bowl is remarkable, yet since it was excavated, it had been in storage for a century. It was discovered during excavations that took place between 1912 and 1914, conducted by Jocelyn Plunkett Bushe-Fox, an Inspector of Ancient Monuments at the Office of Works (a precursor of English Heritage).
In 1916, Bushe-Fox withheld the details of the homoerotic bowl in his report. His write-up had no accompanying illustration, and his description was sketchy: he wrote that the bowl was decorated with ‘erotic couples’ but provided no details. Bushe-Fox presumably feared that the image would be deemed obscene and publication would be illegal under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.
As part of a wider research project, the bowl was examined by English Heritage curators in 2024. Under magnification it was discovered that one of the three erotic couples was a same-sex pair.
Depictions of couples engaged in sex, usually male–female, do occasionally occur on decorated samian, but this image has never been seen before by scholars and there are no parallels for the motif. Archaeological evidence that allows for conjecture about the sexual preferences of individual people in the distant past is extremely unusual.
The bowl is remarkable. As part of English Heritage’s largest site collection, it is also of one of tens of thousands of objects, derived from excavations, that provide fascinating insight into the lives and beliefs of Wroxeter’s civilian inhabitants, thousands of years ago.
Find out more
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History of Wroxeter Roman City
Founded in the mid 1st century AD, Wroxeter was one of the largest cities in Roman Britain and is exceptionally well preserved.
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Collection at Wroxeter Roman City
Tens of thousands of objects provide evidence about the lives and beliefs of Wroxeter’s civilian inhabitants from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD.
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LGBTQ History
LGBTQ history has often been hidden from view. Find out more about the lives of some LGBTQ individuals and their place in the stories of English Heritage sites.