Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome

by Kirk Ormand

Overview

Historians 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.

Ormand treats Greece and Rome in separate sections, with ample cross-references and comparisons. Within each section, individual chapters focus on different types of texts and visual arts. Just as sexuality is presented differently in our legal cases than it is on television sitcoms, or supermarket tabloids, the reader will naturally find that the Greeks and Romans talk one way about sex, love, and marriage in legal speeches and another way in comedies, satires, and philosophical texts. Ormand's analysis takes into account changes in attitude over time, as well as different modes of presenting a complex and interconnected set of social beliefs and behaviors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275988807
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/30/2008
Series:	Praeger Series on the Ancient World
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

KIRK ORMAND is Associate Professor of Classics at Oberlin College and author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999).

Table of Contents

Series Foreword by Bella Vivante
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Homer, Hesiod, and Greek Lyric Poetry
Chapter 3: Sexual Rroles and Ssexual Rrules in Cclassical Athens
Chapter 4: Sexuality in Greek Comedy
Chapter Five: Legal and illegal sex
Chapter 6: Philosophical sex
Chapter 7: Love and sex in Hellenistic Poetry
Chapter 8: Rome and Roman sex
Chapter 9: Roman Comic Sex
Chapter 10: Legal and illegal sex in ancient Rome
Chapter 11: Roman poetry about love and/or sex
Chapter 12: Excursus: Lesbians in Ovids Metamorphoses
Chapter 13: Imperial Sex: Nero and Seneca
Chapter 14: Sex in satire and invective poetry
Chapter 15: Epilogue

What People are Saying About This

David Halperin

"Comprehensive, reader-friendly, richly detailed, forthright, subtle, and very clear, Controlling Desires is the only handbook on ancient sexuality that works persistently to offset modern readers’ assumptions about sex and sexuality, to challenge the notion that sexuality is natural and universal, and to bring out the differences between ancient and modern discourses of sex—or, even, between ancient and modern experiences of desire. As such, it is a very helpful resource for students working on the history of sexuality in classical antiquity, because it shows how such a history might be possible and what is actually historical about sexuality."

Editorial Reviews

Ormand's wide-ranging analysis, from Homer, Plato, Sappho, and Aristophanes to Plautus, Cicero, Ovid, and Petronius adds an additional level of insight into traditional classical studies.” —College & Research Libraries News

From the Publisher