Roman Sexualities

by Judith P. Hallett (Editor), Marilyn B. Skinner (Editor)

This collection of essays seeks to establish Roman constructions of sexuality and gender difference as a distinct area of research, complementing work already done on Greece to give a fuller picture of ancient sexuality. By applying feminist critical tools to forms of public discourse, including literature, history, law, medicine, and political oratory, the essays explore the hierarchy of power reflected so strongly in most Roman sexual relations, where noblemen acted as the penetrators and women, boys, and slaves the penetrated. In many cases, the authors show how these roles could be inverted--in ways that revealed citizens' anxieties during the days of the early Empire, when traditional power structures seemed threatened.


In the essays, Jonathan Walters defines the impenetrable male body as the ideational norm; Holt Parker and Catharine Edwards treat literary and legal models of male sexual deviance; Anthony Corbeill unpacks political charges of immoral behavior at banquets, while Marilyn B. Skinner, Ellen Oliensis, and David Fredrick trace linkages between social status and the gender role of the male speaker in Roman lyric and elegy; Amy Richlin interrogates popular medical belief about the female body; Sandra R. Joshel examines the semiotics of empire underlying the historiographic portrayal of the empress Messalina; Judith P. Hallett and Pamela Gordon critique Roman caricatures of the woman-desiring woman; and Alison Keith discovers subversive allusions to the tragedy of Dido in the elegist Sulpicia's self-depiction as a woman in love.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Classics, Ancient History, LGBT

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

Reviews

[Louise Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fundamental to understanding roman sexuality which hasn't been sanitised by squeamish european classicists.

The Teratogenic Grid by Parker was extremely interesting to my studies in university.
Parker sets out "The Norms", and what deviance from them supposedly looks like.
The ancient world, both Greek and Roman, did not base its classification on gender, but on a completely different axis, that of active versus passive. This has one immediate and important consequence, which we must face at the beginning. Simply put, there was no such emic, cultural abstraction as "homosexuality" in the ancient world. The fact that a man had sex with other men did not determine his sexual category. Equally, it must be emphasized, there was no such concept as "heterosexuality."

"The passive homosexual was not rejected for his homosexuality but for his passivity,"

[Fiona Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think in my head, I romanticized this whole concept more than what this book actually outlay.
This was a very scholarly read. It felt like every other word was in Latin, but everything was so well explained that I felt like it wasn’t too cumbersome to follow along to.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t love anthologies. I like getting into the mind of one author and staying there, but I think all these voices did a great job of blending together in order to make definite directions in similar manners. They seem like a group of friends who all enjoy the same theme and stuck to it beautifully.
And yet, another point that bugged me was that this book concentrated on the relatable middle to low classes. I was hoping for more friction and looking into the tumultuous times and how those situations were dealt with. Caligula, sexuality in reference to Christianity, homosexuality, orgies. These chapters were not as spicy and focused more on home life and the institution of regulated pornography.
Overall, based on the fact that it has multiple authors, is not on the exact subject matter I am delving into, and the fact I skimmed it without learning anything earth-shattering, I don’t think it’s a book I need to keep for reference.