Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and RomeHistorians of ancient Greece and Rome are sometimes hesitant to engage with the well-documented fact that Greek and Roman men regularly engaged in same-sex sexual relations with younger men. In a similar vein, scholars have constructed elaborate social explanations for Sappho, a 6th-century woman from the island of Lesbos who wrote passionate poetry about her erotic relations with a number of women, in order to avoid her apparent sexual orientation. On the other hand, in recent times the Greeks and Romans have occasionally been idealized as prototypes of modern homosexuality or bisexuality. In this engaging, cross-disciplinary book, Ormand argues that the Greeks and Romans thought of sex and sexuality in ways fundamentally different from our own. Ormand's exploration of Greek and Roman sexual practice allows readers the opportunity to see how attitudes and beliefs about sex—sexuality, in short—functioned in the early civilizations of the West, and how those attitudes reveal the unspoken rules that defined public and private behavior. |
From inside the book
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... KINSMAN So , do you ride bareback when you are writing a Phaedra ?? AGATHON ignoring the last comment . And if someone is writing a manly play , he has what he needs in his body from the start . But what he has not ac- quired ...
... Kinsman strikes him as odd , but not immoral . The Kinsman is , as he points out , old and no longer attractive . But the only thing preventing Euripides from enjoy- ing sexual activity with the Kinsman , at least as the Scythian sees ...
... Kinsman before either sees him : EURIPIDES There is a certain Agathon— KINSMAN Do you mean the dark , muscular one ? EURIPIDES No , another one . Have you never seen him ? KINSMAN Not the one with the shaggy beard ? EURIPIDES You haven ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Homer Hesiod and Greek Lyric Poetry | 21 |
Sexual Roles and Sexual Rules in Classical Athens | 46 |
Copyright | |
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