This volume seeks to elucidate sexual practices in antiquity, rather than the more familiar ground of eroticism or gender, as well as the cultural context that informs them. Using a range of modern theories, its contributions explore both textual and non-textual material from the archaic to the early Christian eras. The introduction outlines these goals, defines the book's terms, situates its approaches within current scholarship and summarises the chapters. These studies join the outpouring of scholarship on sexuality in antiquity, but aim to focus on actual sexual practices, as well as other understudied topics, in order to open up new directions for study. The 21 contributions, divided into six thematically organised sections of varying length, range from theoretically informed analyses to informative surveys; rather than provide a comprehensive overview of sex in antiquity, they deal with topics ranging from sexual practices to literary metaphors. Each contribution provides a bibliography, and the volume concludes with a useful index locorum and general index. There are some minor copy-editing issues: excessive notes, inconsistent figure numbers and typographical errors in some chapters.
Part 1, ‘Aspects of Homoeroticism’, contains five chapters, four on male homosexuality and one on female homoeroticism, in material and textual sources. K. Kapparis re-examines Athenian laws against male prostitution (the hetairēsis and epangelia). He successfully decouples same-sex relations from prostitution, countering K. Dover's homophobia and modern misinterpretations of this topic, and resituates these laws within the Athenian political landscape. He persuasively concludes that the ‘male prostitutes’ targeted in these laws are mere scapegoats: he argues that the laws seek to bar an undesirable, lower class of men from influencing Athenian politics with dangerous demagoguery. In examining scenes of group sex in vase paintings in the second chapter, T.K. Hubbard deftly traces the male gaze between participants to emphasise themes of male homosociality and masculine spectatorship and performance. He ultimately reads these vases as titillating conversation pieces at dinner parties rather than shameful evidence of debauchery. Serafim uses modern theory (cognitive neurophysiology and gender performance, among others) to examine the portrayal of sneezing in ancient physiognomic treatises. His convincing argument that sneezing is presented as an involuntary betrayal of a man's homosexuality is enlightening. M. Spanakis examines themes of pederasty (e.g. love as a hunt) in the epigrams of Rhianus to argue that the male gaze in these poems is that of Rhianus as an older erastes in his function as a palaestrophylax in a gymnasium. The chapter contains insightful readings, particularly of 12.146, although its overall argument is difficult to follow and conflates the poet-speaker with the author Rhianus. Lastly, A. Fountoulakis deftly teases out the sexual practices alluded to in Lucian's Dial. Meretr. 5 and persuasively connects them with the interplay of silence and revelation in the text, and with Lucian's narrative strategies, which evoke Greek cultural norms only to undermine them.
Part 2, ‘Sex and Medicine’, contains two highly original, well-argued chapters. C. Thumiger connects the ancient practice of clitoridectomy and sexual intercourse: using both medical texts and literary scenes of sacrifice (e.g. Iphigenia in Euripides), she situates these surgical practices within ancient rhetoric about control over the female body to read both clitoridectomy and penetrative sexual intercourse as violations of the female body. Ultimately, Thumiger's persuasive and original argument expands the definition of intercourse and links the ancient practice of clitoridectomy with interventions concerning the female body in the Victorian era and beyond. Kazantzidis investigates a number of intriguing parallels between orgasm and the epileptic fit in the medical texts of the Hippocratic corpus and Aretaeus of Cappadocia. Following this line of inquiry, he successfully draws out the uncomfortable relationship between sexual desire and disgust, between pleasure and pain, in ancient thought, although further consideration of the role gender plays in this relationship would have been welcome.
In Part 3, ‘The Use and Abuse of Sex Objects’, four essays examine objects associated with sex in a broad sense, ranging from sex toys to erotic motifs, to statues in stories of agalmatophilia. B. Bednarek's logical argument outlines the role of the chair or stool in vase paintings as an erotic motif. Starting with the chair strewn with clothes from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, he shows how the stool becomes an iconographic marker of undressing in athletic scenes and in erotic contexts, before arguing that even in ambiguous paintings the empty stool acts as an erotic motif, a teaser of sexual activity to follow. In the next chapter E. Stafford re-examines the literary and material evidence for sex toys in antiquity and concludes that dildos were proper sex toys while sandals and olive oil were sexual accessories. Her level-headed analyses question earlier assumptions – for example, she takes ancient statements about dildos with a grain of salt, given misogynistic rhetoric of female sexual insatiability. The next two contributions examine statues as sex objects: R. Höschele's well-organised chapter studies literary episodes of agalmatophilia as sexual encounters, with both male and female would-be lovers; she investigates the origin of the motif, what sexual acts are represented in stories of agalmatophilia, what kind of statues elicit sexual desire and other such questions, and she concludes the contribution with a helpful chart outlining these details. C.N. Michalopoulos also focuses on sex with statues, but rather reads the story of Ovid's Pygmalion as a foundational story of agalmatophilia with structuring motifs that echo throughout literary depictions. He traces these motifs in insightful close readings of Ovid's Laodamia from Heroides 13 and the Priapea, although the idea of a structuring motif is more successful in the latter analysis.
The contributions of Part 4, ‘Sexual Liminality’, focus on non-human sexuality and sexual encounters. J. McInerney's excellent chapter examines the paradoxes and anxieties surrounding male sexuality, with its messy and uncontrollable erections and ejaculations, in Athenian thought via their origin myth. He demonstrates that negative portrayals of satyrs and parallels in medical texts problematise the portrayal of Hephaistos in his attempted rape of Athena. He thus points out that Erichthonius’ conception outside the womb and the Athenians’ autochthonous origin are not as neat a solution as they first appear, but one that hints at uncontrollable bloodshed. J. Malheiro Magalhães examines both mythological and literary sources on human–animal sexual relations. This clear survey concludes that such relations are without exception portrayed as against nature, although it is a missed opportunity to investigate what these episodes tell us about ancient ideologies of sexuality, power and control, gender roles in sexual relations and more. With incisive, nuanced readings of the episodes of the vine-women and moon-men from Lucian's Verae Historiae C. Popescu persuasively shows that the text's attempts to eliminate a female ‘other’ and to create a male-only society result rather in feminising the male body and highlighting its failure to appropriate female reproductive capabilities. Her deft use of modern gender and body theories and of ancient thought on medicine and the gendered body make her arguments thoroughly convincing.
Part 5, ‘Sex and Disgust’, contains only one contribution, which links well to Kazantzidis's chapter on epileptic fits and orgasm. Through close readings of Martial (2.41, 7.67 and the Postumus cycle of Book 2) G. Evangelou argues that the feeling of disgust Martial evokes in his readers does not act in a moral capacity, but rather causes laughter; thus this chapter well examines the mechanics of disgust and laughter in Martial's poetry.
Part 6, ‘The Scripts of Sexuality: Drama, Novel, Papyri and Later Texts’, focuses on textual materials. It begins with N. Manousakis's chapter, which seeks to draw attention to Aeschylus’ underappreciated sexual imagery. On the basis of mostly persuasive close readings of both fragments and better-known scenes (e.g. Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon) Manousakis argues that Aeschylus’ language describing heterosexual relations uses almost exclusively agricultural metaphors and emphasises procreation, while a single fragmentary reference to homosexual relations is focused on pleasure. The next chapter also looks at sexual metaphors: D. Kanellakis examines agricultural and sailing metaphors for both sex and politics in Aristophanes. After lengthy overviews of these metaphors in other Greek literature, Kanellakis shows how Aristophanes employs this ‘literary lexicography’ in general, before using this framework to argue in the conclusion for a ‘pessimistic’ reading of the ending of Peace: according to Kanellakis the ‘gang rapes’ of Theoria and Opora demonstrate that the proposed peace treaty will be handled similarly. This highly original and persuasive argument deserves more space. I.M. Konstantakos traces the development of the comedic theme of the deflowered virgin who remains innocent of sex from the Aesopic corpus to a later Byzantine collection of fables, through the Ionian epic Margites and a Hittite apologue as well as the Attic mythological comedy Callisto by Amphis and a novella by Rustico. He draws a number of interesting connections, particularly between the Greek and the Near Eastern material, although considerations of gender, given that the deflowered virgin is not always a woman, and of rape would have been welcome. A. Papathomas and A. Koroli examine the role of sex in abusive marriages via two female-authored papyri (P.Oxy. VI 903 and P.Oxy. L 3581): they examine the uneven gendered power dynamics in these marriages and attempt to determine to what extent this abuse was sexualised, more persuasively with regard to the second papyrus. Additional explanation of the social contexts of these testimonies and consideration of the rhetorical practice of these female-authored texts also would have been welcome. R. Hatzilambrou attempts to determine why there is so little evidence for love letters in the corpus of Greek papyri in Egypt. She situates the few extant examples in their contexts and concludes that the lack of privacy for letters in antiquity, low literacy rates and concerns about shame thwarted the intimate purpose of the love letter. Most love letters, she persuasively argues, were likely delivered over short distances and destroyed after reading, while the few examples remaining were probably addressed to prostitutes or enslaved individuals; most lovers probably felt a magical spell would achieve their goals more readily than a letter. Lastly, S. Efthymiadis and C. Messis deftly trace the paradigm of Diotima from Plato's Symposium through early Christian texts (Methodius’ Symposium, the Pseudo-Clementines and the martyrdoms of St Nereus and St Achilles); they argue that these authors adapt Diotima's role into new, ‘female’ mouthpieces to give voice to emerging sexual mores, namely virginity, and to denounce the spread of gendered violence.
The diverse subject matter of the volume makes it of interest to scholars studying not only sexual practices in antiquity, but also gender, the body, and the individual authors and phenomena discussed here. It sheds valuable light on specific sexual practices and other understudied topics: its contributions address questions not found discussed elsewhere in scholarship.
