Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome

by Caroline Vout

The ancient Greeks and Romans were not shy about sex. Phallic imagery, sex scenes, and the lively activities of their promiscuous gods adorned many objects, buildings, and sculptures. Drinking cups, oil-lamps, and walls were decorated with scenes of seduction; statues of erect penises served as boundary-stones and signposts; and marble satyrs and nymphs grappled in gardens.

Caroline Vout examines the abundance of sexual imagery in Greek and Roman culture. Were these images intended to be shocking, humorous, or exciting? Are they about sex or love? How are we to know whether our responses to them are akin to those of the ancients? The answers to these questions provide fascinating insights into ancient attitudes toward religion, politics, sex, gender, and the body. They also reveal how the ancients saw themselves and their world, and how subsequent centuries have seen them. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this lively and thought-provoking book not only addresses theories of sexual practice and social history, it is also a visual history of what it meant and still means to stare sex in the face.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Classics, Sexuality, Art

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 2013

About the author

Caroline Vout is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the Roman imperial period and its reception (see e.g. Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, Cambridge University Press, 2007, The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City, Cambridge University Press, 2012 and, co-edited with Helen Lovatt, Epic Visions, Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her most recent book is Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, published by the British Museum Press (2013). She was curator of the international exhibition of ancient sculpture, Antinous: Face of the Antique, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (summer 2006) and author of its accompanying catalogue, and in 2008 was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work on Art History. She is an editor of Omnibus, Perspective (the journal of the National Institute of the History of Art in Paris) and the Cambridge Classical Journal, on the council of the Classical Association and Chair of the Criticos Prize. She has both appeared on and consulted for television and radio and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very helpful book in thinking about how the Greeks might have viewed their own artistic production in its different contexts, then how the Romans approached the same subjects (my new favorite thing is that many Romans, known for their very realistic bust portraiture, experimented with putting those clearly identifiable heads on idealized Greek bodies). Also enjoyable was the excursus on the collectors who donated erotic art, and how it might be a mistake to think of them as particularly prurient in every case because their erotic collections are often divorced from the context that, in one case anyway, ancient coins were the bulk of the donation (setting numismatists atwitter, perhaps, but not necessarily making much of an impression on the general public).

The photography in this book was excellent, as was the weighty photo-paper stock. My only quibble would be that though this is by no means a small hardcover, it's not coffee-table art-book size, so sometimes photographs were a little small, particularly when there were several illustrating a similar point or mythological scene. Overall though, the photography was as good as or better than that in Clarke's Roman Sex, covering a wider time period.

[Sebastian Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book because I’m interested in sex. Oh… and art and culture too! Who – if they’re being really and truly honest – isn’t? (Interested in sex, that is?)

Having flicked through the pages to have a quick look over the pics, I made ready to, um… get stuck in, so to speak. My view was immediately arrested by the bizarre pendant of fig. 1: ‘Pet Phallus’, c. 100 BC… length 9.2 cm. Even amongst academics and custodians of culture it appears size matters!

However, any idea that this might be an erotic viewing or reading experience, never mind entertaining (a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour – steady! – might not have gone amiss), rapidly evaporates upon reading the text, which is worthy but, frankly, rather dull.

Caroline Vout displays an admirable breadth of erudition, and the text is very clearly and sensibly organised, but it feels a bit flat and lacking in passion. The potential eroticism of the objects and images is rinsed out with academic earnestness; comprehensive and balanced, perhaps, but – for me at least – flaccid.

The book itself, organised into six chapters over approx. 240 pages, and supported by nearly 200 crisp, clear images (as many of these are context-setting as are sexual), is a handsome and well made thing, but I’d say it was beautiful, as opposed to sexy.

Some of the images and objects can, as Vout says, still shock and challenge us, despite the pervasive ubiquity of sexual imagery in what some might call our ‘permissive’ culture.

Vout traces the history of these objects, from their contexts and origins, inasmuch as we can determine them, via later fates, including their passage through the collections of private ‘antiquarians’ of the relatively recent past, such as ‘Ned’ Warren and, a bit further back, Charles Townley. It was the collections of such men that stocked the museums they now reside in, the material here being predominantly drawn from the stock of the British Museum, who also published the book.

Having examined how the Greeks and Romans may have related to this material, Vout eventually looks at a range of C18th ideas, from admiration to opprobrium. On the one hand Vout quotes an Enlightenment collector, enthusiast and apologist, who ‘argued passionately for sexual tolerance’, and talks of the ‘noble simplicity of the ancients’, whilst on the other we hear from one of the numerous critics of such collectors, who decries their collections for being filled with ‘generative organs in their most odious and degrading protrusion’!

It’s only very recently that many of these once relatively commonplace objects, and this is particularly true of the more risqué ones included here – which include fairly explicit depictions of bestiality, rape and homosexuality (some taboos evolve, others perhaps don’t) – have begun to emerge from the shadow of our more recent Christian heritage, and find their way into public view, outside of the private/esoteric confines of the ‘museum secretum’.

These changing modes of display reflect evolving values, and the ‘Warren Cup’, for example, has enjoyed an odyssey from ‘controversial’ object of private admiration to British Museum shop souvenir!*

For me this book, whilst undoubtedly really quite interesting, and filled with many beautiful objects and images (as well as some strange, some disturbing, and some weird or banal), dissects rather than penetrates its subject, and is, rather bizarrely perhaps, almost sexless.

Towards the end of the book, as she starts to sum up, Vout refers to a Barbican show called Seduced (fairly recent at the time of I first read this book, but ages ago now) which she describes as ‘a show which put visual stimulation over and above context’. Vout very avowedly does the precisely the opposite.

* The British Museum famously (or infamously, depending on your views on ‘Uranian love’ and capitalism and the arts) bought the Warren Cup for an eye-watering £1.8 million, in 1999.

[Seolhe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 stars

If I judged this by visual appeal alone, it'd be an easy 5 stars. It's a beautifully formatted book, full of high-quality photographs, and honestly, that's primarily what I came to this book for.
But ultimately, my rating is dragged down a little by the actual text itself, which, while not bad per se, is just a little dry and a lot padded. With both of the books I've read by Caroline Vout, I've just felt like she's using a lot of words without necessarily saying very much.

I will also say that there is a very... colonial overtone to this book that I didn't really love.
It focuses way too much on the British collectors that bought, sold and donated the items showcased throughout the book, while the countries that originated them are stuck firmly in the ancient past. The trade in antiquities and their place in institutions like the British museum is treated as a moral neutral, and while I don't think she needn't have condemned them, talking this much about all this colonial history without in any way examining it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

[Maud · Rating 4 out of 5]

head empty just pretty sculptures

[Kermit · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I liked the topic and collation of artifacts, I thought the writing was strained. The first quarter was decent, and then it just started repeating itself.

[Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really interesting in the subject matter that it tackled, and I loved how it explained why statues were nude, and also how it went into how gender was presented. However I didn't feel like the chapter at the end was needed, which is why I'm giving it 4 stars.

[James Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fab - done a proper review on the Amazon.co.uk page