Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture
Marilyn B. Skinner
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 1444349864
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This agenda-setting text has been fully revised in its second edition, with coverage extended into the Christian era. It remains the most comprehensive and engaging introduction to the sexual cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.
- Covers a wide range of subjects, including Greek pederasty and the symposium, ancient prostitution, representations of women in Greece and Rome, and the public regulation of sexual behavior
- Expanded coverage extends to the advent of Christianity, includes added illustrations, and offers student-friendly pedagogical features
- Text boxes supply intriguing information about tangential topics
- Gives a thorough overview of current literature while encouraging further reading and discussion
- Conveys the complexity of ancient attitudes towards sexuality and gender and the modern debates they have engendered
The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens
Greek and Roman Architecture in Classic Drawings
questioned whether heterosexuality itself is a strictly biological or a culturally imposed phenomenon (Rubin 1975; Rich 1980). Notions that “natural features of gender, and natural processes of sex and reproduction, furnish only a suggestive and ambiguous backdrop to the cultural organization of gender and sexuality” and that “sexuality is socially shaped and, in the course of this, inevitably curbed” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1, 25) were very much in the air during the late 1970s, largely due
contributes matter, in the form of menstrual blood (which, being a residue, is itself richer than ordinary blood), to nourish the resulting embryo. If women’s role in the reproductive process is circumscribed, however, it is �precisely because in other ways she has been more closely assimilated to the opposite sex. For Aristotle, woman was a human being, although less perfectly formed than man: famously, he states she is “a defective male, as it were” (Gen. an. 737a.28). In so far as her lesser
checking at “grass-bearing gardens” connote, then, but a promise to confine himself to the pubic hair, without entering the vagina? That would be one of the unspecified delights of the goddess available to him apart from the “divine thing,” full sexual intercourse. On that assumption, his addressing the girl with the matronymic (i.e., identifying her as her mother’s daughter, rather than using the father’s name for filiation, which was the ordinary procedure) is suggestive, because that was
conduct. As a �recognized institution it had previously been nonexistent, despite the likelihood that individual private acts of sex with boys would have taken place often enough. The silence of epic is Dover’s best argument. True, there may be reasons for that omission other than absence of the corresponding reality. In non-literate Homeric society, epic poetry recited on public occasions served as an educational medium, encoding social norms in easily remembered narrative form and thereby
Furthermore, if the narrator of the “Cologne Epode” did confine himself to grassy gardens, or even if the complete text merely flirted with that option, as it appears to do, we may be confident that the “penetration model,” though the prevailing one, did not exhaust the patterns of male sexual conduct available for representation in Greek art and literature. Conclusion After that tiresome survey of learned controversy, you may suspect that we really possess very little firm knowledge about the