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Plutarch On Sex1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Peter Walcot
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Extract

One of the less expected treatises included in Plutarch's Moralia consists of the nine books of ‘Table-talk’ or topics suitable for discussion by the participants at the strictly male and private drinking party or symposium (612Cff.) But even when the association of symposium and the erotic is acknowledged or we note the interest of ancient philosophers in the general area of eugenics (e.g., Arist. Pol. 1334b29 ff. and Plutarch on the Spartan marriage, Lye. 15.3–9) or we identify the type of prejudice which later led Christians to believe that a child conceived on a Sunday will be a leper or epileptic, the sixth question analysed in Book 3, ‘the right time to make love’ (653Bff), is perhaps considerably more surprising. The conclusion eventually reached, however, will occasion no alarm: the right time for men and women to sleep together would appear to be at night when it is dark (cf. 654D–E) – after all, we are busy and preoccupied throughout the day and are not animals like the cock eager for sex first thing in the morning. But in the evening we are relaxed and at our ease, and so the time is right provided, of course, we have neither eaten nor drunk to excess. This is hardly a conclusion, however, to be warmly welcomed by the sexually liberated for whom intercourse is there to be enjoyed wherever, and at whatever time of night or day, excitement mounts. But when it comes to sex, Plutarch is no revolutionary keen to experiment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , October 1998 , pp. 166 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

Notes

2. Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family and Patronage: a Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford, 1964), 277Google Scholar.

3. For nudity and the Greek woman, see, most recently, the papers by Cohen, Beth, Younger, John G., Salomon, Nanette, and Ajootian, Aileen in Koloski-Ostrow, Ann Olga and Lyons, Claire L. (edd.), Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (London and New York, 1997), 66–92Google Scholar, 120–53, 197–219, and 220–42. Cf. alsoSeremetakis, C. Nadia, The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar: ‘Nakedness implies the isolate. … Nakedness also evokes the cold, the damp, and winter. … The naked death is also a symbol of “poverty”.… Nakedness as a contrasocial and as linked to solitary conditions implies the uncovered, the unsheltered, the outside, the abandoned, the unprotected. Uncovered flesh is embarrassing, as is the unattended ceremony. Both are the exposure of the inside to the outside’ (76). Practical consequences are the subject of comment from Campbell: ‘The shame which is felt at the exposure of the body, even when no other person is present, means that undergarments are not changed for long periods and the body between the neck and ankles is never washed’ (287) .

4. Muller, , FHG 2.259Google Scholar.

5. Walvin, James, Victorian Values (Cardinal, 1988), 120Google Scholar.

6. Cf. Sailer, Richard, G&R 27 (1980), 69ffGoogle Scholar.

7. An edition of the Erôtikos by Frederick E. Brenk is forthcoming in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Imperial Library series. Brenk has already considered the dialogue inIllinois Classical Studies 13 (1988), 457–71Google Scholar.

8. On widows and their reputation, seeWalcot, , SO 66 (1991), 5–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Not without interest to the student of Plutarch on sex and women is ‘evidence’ presented byFerris, Paul in his ‘twentieth-century history’, Sex and the British (London, 1993)Google Scholar: ‘A. Dennison Light, editor of Health and Vim magazine, and devoted to fitness – he said the best time to conceive a child was between eleven and twelve in the morning, when people felt at their best’ (116); ‘Sir Kingsley Amis was once quoted as saying, “The end of the urge to have sex is an enormous relief. Someone, I think it was Sophocles, said it was like being chained to a lunatic”’ (172); ‘As for the sexual guilt that pornography was supposed to assuage, Dr Sim said bleakly that “if you take guilt out of sex, you take guilt away from society, and I do not think society could function without guilt”’ (233); and, ‘Woody Allen observed that “sex shouldn't be dirty, but it is if you're doing it right”’ (279). The reason why I quote Ferris is to stress that there is nothing outlandish or bizarre in the general Greek, or in Plutarch's personal, evaluation of sex .