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. |
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... role in determining what is appropriate sexual behavior for an individual . In the modern West , men who prefer to engage in sex with other men , rather than women , are gay . Whether true or not , one prevalent set of assumptions in ...
... roles in such a relationship , the playwright is at some pains to explain how it is that a com- mon origin results in these ... role in public life and who are the only " men " when they grow up . We may want to recall here that the real ...
... role that is generically and literarily appropriate . This , I suggest , is the culminating example of Ovid " [ having ] it almost all ways . ' " 10 The image of Iphis as elegiac lover continues in the rest of the passage . At 750 and ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Homer Hesiod and Greek Lyric Poetry | 21 |
Sexual Roles and Sexual Rules in Classical Athens | 46 |
Copyright | |
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