A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities
Language: English
Pages: 680
ISBN: 140519572X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities presents a comprehensive collection of original essays relating to aspects of gender and sexuality in the classical world.
- Views the various practices and discursive contexts of sexuality systematically and holistically
- Discusses Greece and Rome in each chapter, with sensitivity to the continuities and differences between the two classical civilizations
- Addresses the classical influence on the understanding of later ages and religion
- Covers artistic and literary genres, various social environments of sexual conduct, and the technical disciplines of medicine, magic, physiognomy, and dream interpretation
- Features contributions from more than 40 top international scholars
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Eden had suffered considerably in the aftermath of their transgression (see Gen 3). Originally, Gregory of Nyssa suggested, humanity had been created undifferentiated by gender and sex organs, able to reproduce asexually, in the manner of angels—a capacity that was lost after the Fall. According to the Nyssen, it was to this primal state that the resurrection would return humanity (On the Making of Man 17.2–4). Sexual renunciation, as in the case of his sister Macrina, promised a foretaste of
equated with prostitutes; according to the sacred prostitution skeptics, this is the result of an Israelite rhetorical strategy that equates pagan religious practice with “whoring” rather than with actual acts of prostitution by the cult personnel (Westenholz 1989; Budin 2008, 23–5, 38–42). A key passage that cannot be satisfactorily explained this way, however, is Genesis 38, in which Tamar is described interchangeably as both prostitute and qedesha. Therefore sexually promiscuous women, some
matter how much Horace wishes this relationship were equal, he returns from his fantasy to a reality in which Maecenas is superior, ending the third stanza with a more masculine metaphor: “We will go, we will go, wherever you lead forth, companions prepared to snatch the last journey” (Carm. 2.17.10–12). Here the correct boundaries of the patron–client relationship are redrawn, with Maecenas in the lead. Yet, unlike in the sexual aggression inflicted by Memmius onto Catullus, here Horace and
and in the way they are treated. Whereas Aeschylus' and Sophocles' plays deal with sexual issues apart from passionate love, Euripides' plays deal frankly with erōs—treated in the Medea and Hippolytus as an overwhelming, compulsive desire for a particular individual. Seneca's Oedipus, like Sophocles' eponymous play, deals with incest; his Medea and Phaedra, like Euripides' plays on the same myths, deal with erōs' destructive force. But Seneca is both more censorious than his Greek counterparts,
the other (non-pirate) lovers, whom he resembles in age, Gnathon is meant to be unappealing: he lacks good looks, and his blunt, indiscriminate appetite for all forms of fleshly pleasure (eating, drinking, and fornicating) can prompt only distaste. Still, he tries to maintain an insider's credential by being “naturally inclined to boys” (4.11, phusei paiderastēs ōn), and there is no better evidence of how far the ideal can fall. Daphnis will have no part of it; thus persuasion fails and rape