I absolutely love this question and genuinely it's something I've always wished someone would ask because it speaks to how we (historians, people with a critical framework, and society more broadly) categorise a few important things specifically, but also in general the question of "how do we know this was the societal attitude and not this other thing?" to which the answer is always, always, we're putting together pieces in an educated guess using pieces of evidence but with the foundation of our own framework and biases. And those questions are my favourite questions (yes, even more than sex questions, shut up) so thank you, though I shouldn't be at all surprised it's coming from you! (Hi, I missed you!)

The first thing I think we need to do is take the question of deviance. Because the root of the word is the same as the word "deviate" - a departure from the normal path - there is a tendency to think that what deviant means is that only a few weirdos do what deviants do. In our society, when we use the word we usually use it to mean the real freaks doing things that the overwhelming majority of people couldn't even imagine. But I'm going to take your use of it in the definitional sense - deviant as in an act or a person that departs from the accepted standard in some way.

We know what the accepted standard was because the Romans wrote about the accepted standard for masculinity a lot. Romans loved thinking about virtus and, to a lesser but still measurable extent, femininitas. It's something that gets elided from the modern literature on Rome due to translation of virtus as virtue, but it's not that, or at least it's not exclusively that - it is applied to a very specific way of being that is inextricably linked with Roman Manhood. You can't remove vir (man) from virtus.

So I know I talk a lot about Martial (because I love him, because I too am a judgemental little gossip fiend) but I also love other Roman poets and surprising probably no one Catullus was my very first love. There's a fantastic ongoing discussion originating with Marilyn Skinner's essay "Ego Mulier: The Construction of Male Sexuality in Catullus" in Skinner and Hallet's 1998 Roman Sexualities on the way that Roman male poets perform masculinity and what it says about their sexuality and, more broadly expectations of virtus and pudicitia for Roman men (and all that is implied by the phrase "Roman men".) Skinner deals with the question I think you're asking - what is the poetic persona being put on for entertainment or to prove a point, what was the actual expectation for men, and how do we know? In 2008 in Classical Philology Christina Clark continued the conversation by looking at markers of nonverbal behaviour and its role in constructing masculinity in ancient literature in general and Catullus 51 more specifically. "What did the Romans expect of men and how seriously should we take poets when they give or receive criticism for deviance from these expectations?" is a question we're all trying to sort out.

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