Bisexuality in the ancient world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Bisexuality in the ancient world
Yale University Press, 1994
- pbk.
- Other Title
-
Secondo natura
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Note
Translation of: Secondo natura
Bibliography: p. 273-276
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Bisexuality was intrinsic to the cultures of the ancient world. In both Greece and Roman, sexual relationships between men were acknowledged, tolerated and widely celebrated in literature and art. For the Greeks and Romans, homosexuality was not an exclusive choice, but alternative to and sometime simultaneous with the love of a woman. Drawing on a range of sources - from legal texts, inscriptions and medical documents to poetry and philosophical literature - Eva Cantarella reconstructs the bisexual cultures of Athens and Rome and compares them. She explores the psychological, social and cultural mechanisms that determined male sexual choice and considers the extent to which that choice was free, directed or coerced. She analyzes the link between social class and homosexuality, and assesses the impact of homosexual relations on heterosexual ones. In Greece the relationship between men and young boys was deemed the noblest of associations, a means of education and spiritual exaltation, though such relationships were regulated and never left to individual sponeneity. In Rome, however, the sexual ethic mirrored the political, males being domineering in love as in war.
The critical sexual distinction was that between active and passive, the victims commonly being slaves or defeated enemies rather than young Roman freemen. Cantarella explains how the etiquette of bixexuality was corrupted over time and how homosexuality came to be regarded as an unnatural act when it was influenced by the pagan and Judeo-Christian traditions. The book also has chapters on love between women and the response of women to male homosexuality.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Greece: the beginnings, the Greek Dark Age and the Archaic period
- the Classical age
- homosexuality and heterosexuality compared in philosophy and literature
- women and homosexuality. Part 2 Rome: the Archaic period and the Republic
- the late Republic and the Principate
- the Empire
- the metamorphoses of sexual ethics in the Ancient World.
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