something different for men than it did for women, and for the well-born, than it did for the poor, and for the free citizen, than it did for the slave—for whom the concepts of honor, shame and sexual modesty were said to have no meaning at all. Slaves were not thought to have an interior ethical life because they could go no lower socially and were commonly used sexually; the free and well born who used them were thought to embody social honor and the fine sense of shame suited to their station regardless. Roman literature indicates the Romans were aware of these dualities. Shame was a profoundly social concept that was, in ancient Rome, always mediated by gender and status. "It was not enough that a wife merely regulate her sexual behavior in the accepted ways; it was required that her virtue in this area be conspicuous." Men, on the other hand, were allowed sexual freedoms, such as live-in mistresses and sex with slaves. This permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior a matter of intense importance and at the same time see his own sex with young slave boys as of little concern. The central Christian prohibition against porneia "collided with the deeply entrenched patterns of Roman permissiveness" and exploitation. Harper writes that Christianity sought to establish equal sexual consideration for both men and women within the sanctity of marriage, and to protect all from exploitation whatever their circumstance. This was a transformation in the "deep logic" of sexual morality, a revolution in the rules of behavior, but also, a true transformation in the very image of the human being as free, with power and responsibility for one's own self. Christian sexual ideology is inextricably interwoven with its larger concept of freewill. "In its original form, Christian freewill was a cosmological claim — an argument about the relationship between God's justice and the individual... [but] as Christianity became intermeshed with society, the discussion shifted in revealing ways to the actual psychology of volition and the material constraints on sexual action". The Greeks and Romans said a human being's deepest moralities depended upon their social position, which is given by fate and must, therefore, be simply accepted. Christianity preached freedom, and the power and responsibility that goes with it, no matter what a person's status or position in society. As a result,