Sporus

Sporus was a young slave boy whom the Roman Emperor Nero had castrated and married during his tour of Greece in 66–67 AD, allegedly in order for him to play the role of his wife, Poppaea Sabina, who had died the previous year. Ancient historians generally portray the relationship between Nero and Sporus as an "abomination"; Suetonius places his account of the Nero–Sporus relationship in his scandalous accounts of Nero's sexual aberrations, between his raping a Vestal Virgin and committing incest with his mother. Some think Nero used his marriage to Sporus to assuage the guilt he felt for kicking his pregnant wife Poppaea to death. Dio Cassius, in a more detailed account, writes that Sporus bore an uncanny resemblance to Poppaea and that Nero called Sporus by her name. Some modern scholars, however, question this account and claim that Sporus was by no means a willing participant in his fate. In contrast, they suggest that "the marriage of Nero to Sporus had nothing to do with love, and probably little to do with lust either. It was not some form of prototype 'gay marriage'. It had been intended simply to humiliate a potential rival for the throne through the use of sexual violence against him." Name Some scholars have deduced that Sporus was likely an epithet given to him when his abuse started, considering it is derived from the Greek word , meaning "seed" or "semen", referring to the fact that he could not produce children. Others point out that the name resembles the Latin word spurius of Sabine origin, meaning "illegitimate child", and that it is possible that Nero himself had called the boy Spurius, or that he believed the Greek name Sporus to be related to the Latin word. Life Little is known about Sporus' background except that he was a youth to whom Nero took a liking. He may have been a puer delicatus. These were sometimes castrated to preserve their youthful qualities. The puer delicatus generally was a child-slave chosen by his master for his beauty and sexual attractiveness. Cassius Dio identifies Sporus as the child of a freedman.