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Introduction

Mark Golden and Peter Toohey

in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome
Published in print: 2003 Published Online:
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
March 2012
DOI: 10.3366/
ISBN: 9780748613199 eISBN: 9780748651016 edinburgh/9780748613199.003.0021
Item type: chapter

This book offers a selection of scholarship on sex and gender in ancient

Greece and ancient Rome, beginning from the end of the eighteenth
century, a time of turmoil and ferment. The model of separate spheres
women relegated to private sphere, men to public sphere never
worked particularly well for Rome. Men, especially citizen men, occupied
the public sphere of the community, both literally they alone ranged
freely throughout the Greek and Roman worlds and metaphorically, as
participants in politics, litigants in courts, theater audiences. Women,
contrariwise, were restricted to the home. Meanwhile, sex occupied
a separate sphere of its own, sometimes the province of specialists
in ancient medicine, at others the pastime of collectors of curiosa, of
investigators into sexual positions, sex sellers, the erotic vocabulary.
These fields have been transformed by the work of the past forty years,
first Kenneth Dover's, then, following in his footsteps, that of Michel
Foucault. This book explores sexuality and gender in the ancient world,
focusing on how the roles and spheres of the sexes were divided.

Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour

K. J. Doveri

in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome

Published in print: 2003 Published Online:
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
March 2012
DOI: 10.3366/
ISBN: 9780748613199 eISBN: 9780748651016 edinburgh/9780748613199.003.0005
Item type: chapter

The Greeks regarded sexual enjoyment as the area of life in which the
goddess Aphrodite was interested, as Ares was interested in war and
other deities in other activities. Sexual intercourse was aphrodisia,
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the things of Aphrodite. Sexual desire could be denoted by general

words for desire, but the obsessive desire for a particular person was
eros or love. Our own culture has its myths about the remote past, and
one myth which dies hard is that the invention of sexual guilt, shame
and fear by the Christians destroyed a golden age of free, fearless,
pagan sexuality. That most pagans were in many ways less inhibited
than most Christians is undeniable. This chapter explores attitudes to
sexual behaviour in classical Greece, focusing on inhibition, women's
segregation and adultery, commercial sex, resistance to sexual desire,
homosexuality, class and status, and Greek philosophy and sexual
intercourse.

The Social Body and the Sexual Body

David Halperin

in Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome

Published in print: 2003 Published Online:
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
March 2012
DOI: 10.3366/
ISBN: 9780748613199 eISBN: 9780748651016 edinburgh/9780748613199.003.0006
Item type: chapter

Plato's testimony and Caelius Aurelianus's testimony combine to make

a basic conceptual and historical point. Homosexuality presupposes
sexuality, and sexuality itself is a modern invention. Homosexuality
presupposes sexuality because the very concept of homosexuality
implies that there is a specifically sexual dimension to the human
personality. This chapter provides a picture of the cultural formation
underlying the classical Athenian institution of paederasty, a picture
whose details will have to be filled in at some later point if this aspect of
ancient Greek social relations is ever to be understood historically. Sex
in classical Athens was a manifestation of personal status, a declaration
of social identity; sexual behaviour did not so much express inward
dispositions or inclinations as it served to position social actors in the
places assigned to them, by virtue of their political standing, in the
hierarchical structure of the Athenian polity. Sexuality, for cultures
not shaped by some very recent European and American bourgeois
developments, is not a cause but an effect. The social body precedes the
sexual body.

Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome

Mark Golden and Peter Toohey

Published in print: 2003 Published Online:

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
March 2012
DOI: 10.3366/
ISBN: 9780748613199 eISBN: 9780748651016 edinburgh/9780748613199.001.0001
Item type: book
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This book collects and introduces some of the writing on sexual

behaviour and gender differences in ancient Greece and ancient
Rome, including four chapters translated from German and French.
For centuries, discussions of sexuality and gender in the ancient world,
if they took place at all, focussed on how the roles and spheres of
the sexes were divided. While men occupied the public sphere of
the community, ranged through the Greek and Roman worlds and
participated in politics, courts, theatre and sport, women kept to the
home. Sex occupied a separate sphere, in scholarly terms restricted to
specialists in ancient medicine. And then the subjects were transformed,
first by Sir Kenneth Dover, then by Michel Foucault. The book charts and
illustrates the evolution of scholarly investigation of a once-hidden aspect
of the ancient world. In so doing, it sheds light on aspects of ancient lives
and thought.

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