What may be regarded as true sexual inversion can be traced in Europe from the beginning of the Christian era (though we can scarcely demonstrate the congenital element) especially among two classes—­men of exceptional ability and criminals; and also, it may be added, among those neurotic and degenerate individuals who may be said to lie between these two classes, and on or over the borders of both.  Homosexuality, mingled with various other sexual abnormalities and excesses, seems to have flourished in Rome during the empire, and is well exemplified in the persons of many of the emperors.[43] Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, and Heliogabalus—­many of them men of great ability and, from a Roman standpoint, great moral worth—­are all charged, on more or less solid evidence, with homosexual practices.  In Julius Caesar—­“the husband of all women and the wife of all men” as he was satirically termed—­excess of sexual activity seems to have accompanied, as is sometimes seen, an excess of intellectual activity.  He was first accused of homosexual practices after a long stay in Bithynia with King Nikomedes, and the charge was very often renewed.  Caesar was proud of his physical beauty, and, like some modern inverts, he was accustomed carefully to shave and epilate his body to preserve the smoothness of the skin.  Hadrian’s love for his beautiful slave Antinoues is well known; the love seems to have been deep and mutual, and Antinoues has become immortalized, partly by the romance of his obscure death and partly by the new and strangely beautiful type which he has given to sculpture.[44] Heliogabalus, “the most homosexual of all the company,” as he has been termed, seems to have been a true sexual invert, of feminine type; he dressed as a woman and was devoted to the men he loved.[45]

Homosexual practices everywhere flourish and abound in prisons.  There is abundant evidence on this point.  I will only bring forward the evidence of Dr. Wey, formerly physician to the Elmira Reformatory, New York.  “Sexuality” (he wrote in a private letter) “is one of the most troublesome elements with which we have to contend.  I have no data as to the number of prisoners here who are sexually perverse.  In my pessimistic moments I should feel like saying that all were; but probably 80 per cent, would be a fair estimate.”  And, referring to the sexual influence which some men have over others, he remarks that “there are many men with features suggestive of femininity that attract others to them in a way that reminds me of a bitch in heat followed by a pack of dogs."[46] In Sing Sing prison of New York, 20 per cent, of the prisoners are said to be actively homosexual and a large number of the rest passively homosexual.  These prison relationships are not always of a brutal character, McMurtrie states, the attraction sometimes being more spiritual than physical.[47]