Hi, classicist here! What the actual fuck is that person on about.
I swear this is that person that made the argument that because he's ancient Roman, Marius isn't doing anything that would've been morally wrong in his mortal time too. I'd like to add my perspective on that part specifically.
First off, "Marriageable age" and "age people got married at" are very different concepts in the context of ancient Rome, often men would get married like ten years later than the actual age. While the law said you could marry at 14, that was not the norm at all, and it's like someone nowadays in the UK skipping out on college and uni because they married at 16, maybe seen as stranger than that, because most men focussed on their education or job until they were in their mid twenties, only then marrying.
(I'm unsure if Marius was from the republic or the early empire but that was pretty similar with both periods of time.)
Second of all, being with a boy, in his own time, would have been seen as weird regardless. The eremenos and erastes dynamic was a greek thing that was not very common in Rome, with people at the time having moral suspicions of it, and even then it was held to the same consent ages as things like marriage. Being with someone who is literally not even in puberty like how Armand is described (they say he was fifteen later in the books but that is just not how fifteen year olds work he reads as maybe twelve), would be seen as fucking crazy probably.
What Marius does, in ancient Rome, would have been ridiculed and seen as shameful, because to be with a young girl is terrible but a young boy? That would be seen as incredibly useful smear campaign material to both imply homosexuality (it was a looser concept then but still not very accepted) and also sexual degeneracy.
This is rambling and may not make any sense, but that's just my two cents on it, I don't think fictional characters need to be "held accountable" per se, because they are not real people, but it's stupid to say you like a character while trying to ignore their actions, because that means you like the idea of the character, not the actuality of them.
Now, there is one situation where Marius would be fine to do this in Rome and that is one that just furthers the fact he is a massive racist/xenophobe. That is, slaves, especially those who were "foreign barbarians", were not in possession to the same kind of protection legally regarding sex acts and consent ages, because they weren't seen as being people at the same level as the "civilised" ones.
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