Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World

Summary

Looking at sex and sexuality from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in a variety of media, Sex in Antiquity represents a vibrant picture of the discipline of ancient gender and sexuality studies, showcasing the work of leading international scholars as well as that of emerging talents and new voices.

Sexuality and gender in the ancient world is an area of research that has grown quickly with often sudden shifts in focus and theoretical standpoints. This volume contextualizes these shifts while putting in place new ideas and avenues of exploration that further develop this lively field. This broad study also includes studies of gender and sexuality in the Ancient Near East which not only provide rich consideration of those areas but also provide a comparative perspective not often found in such collections. Sex in Antiquity is a major contribution to the field of ancient gender and sexuality studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction　

1.　Susan Ackerman　‘I Have Hired You with My Son’s Mandrakes’: Women’s Reproductive Magic in Ancient Israel

2.　Roland Boer　From Horse Kissing to Beastly Emissions: Paraphilias in the Ancient Near East

3.　Stephanie L. Budin　Fertility and Gender in the Ancient Near East

4.　Gwendolyn Leick　Too Young - Too Old? Sex and Age in Mesopotamian Literature

5.　Elna K. Solvang　Guarding the House: Conflict, Rape, and David’s Concubines　

6.　Alastair J.L. Blanshard　Fantasy and the Homosexual Orgy: Unearthing the Sexual Scripts of Ancient Athens

7.　Claude Calame　Relations of Sex and Gender in Greek Melic Poetry: Helen Object and Subject of Desire

8.　Monica S. Cyrino　Of Love and Bondage in Euripides’　Hippolytus　

9.　Dorota Dutsch　Dog-Love-Dog:　Kynogamia　and Cynic Sexual Ethics

10.　Kathy L. Gaca　Ancient Warfare and the Ravaging Martial Rape of Girls and Women: Evidence from Homeric Epic and Greek Drama

11.　Allison Glazebrook　‘Sex Ed’ at the Archaic Symposium: Prostitutes, Boys and　Paideia　

12.　Simon Goldhill　Is There a History of Prostitution?

13.　Edward M. Harris　‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in Women’s Desire

14.　Andrew Lear　Was Pederasty Problematized? A Diachronic View

15.　Sheila Murnaghan　Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative

16.　Walter Penrose　Before Queerness? Visions of a Homoerotic Heaven in Ancient Greco-Italic Tomb Paintings

17.　Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz　Melancholy Becomes Electra

18.　James Robson Fantastic Sex: Fantasies of Sexual Assault in Aristophanes　

19.　Sandra Boehringer　What is Philaenis the name of? The Identity, Function and Authority of an Unnamed Figure

20.　Daniel Boyarin　Friends without Benefits; or, Academic Love

21.　Matthew Fox　The Bisexuality of Orpheus

22.　Hunter H. Gardner:　Curiositas, Horror, and the Monstrous-Feminine in Apuleius’　Metamorphoses　

23.　Barbara Gold　The Remaking of Perpetua: A Female Martyr Reconstructed

24.　Judith P. Hallett　Making Manhood Hard: Tiberius and Latin Literary Representations of Erectile Dysfunction

25.　Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson　Revisiting Roman Sexuality: Agency and the Conceptualization of Penetrated Males

26.　Mark Masterson　Toward a Late-Ancient Physiognomy

27.　Kelly Olson　Toga and　Pallium: Status, Sexuality, Identity

28.　Amy Richlin　Reading Boy-Love and Child-Love in the Greco-Roman World

29.　Steven D. Smith　Agathias and Paul the Silentiary: Erotic Epigram and the Sublimation of Same-Sex Desire in the Age of Justinian

30.　Craig Williams　The Language of Gender: Lexical Semantics and the Latin Vocabulary of Unmanly Men

Editor(s) Bio

Mark Masterson is Senior Lecturer of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is author of Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (2014). He has published articles and book chapters on Statius, Vitruvius, the Historia Monachorum, Eugene O’Neill, Emperor Julian, St. Augustine and current New Zealand health policy, and the state of masculinity studies in Classics. He is currently completing a monograph on same-sex desire between Byzantine men, entitled Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Brotherhood, and Male Culture in the Medieval Empire.

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, USA. Author of Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (1993) and Greek Tragedy (2008), she has co-edited Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece, with Sue Blundell and Douglas Cairns (2013), Feminist Theory and the Classics, with Amy Richlin (Routledge, 1993), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, with Lisa Auanger (2002), as well as From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, with Fiona McHardy (2014), which won the Teaching Literature Book Award 2015. She is one of the co-editors and translators of Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (1999).

James Robson is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. His previous publications include Humour, Obscenity and Aristophanes (2006); Aristophanes: An Introduction (shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award, 2009); Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient (with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones; 2010) and Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens (2013).