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Aphrodisia: Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Classical World
Was Ovid a surprising champion of women's sexual pleasure? Or did he just want them to fake it? Where did the British Museum curators hide the most pornographic of frescoes? And what exactly was the phallic wooden object excavated in 90's Northumberland?
In APHRODISIA, Dr Jean Menzies dives into the hidden history of women's sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. The classical world stretched across the Mediterranean for more than a millennium, its people and cultures wide and varied and its sexual proclivities equally so. Yet so often when we read about sex in antiquity it is about the men folk first and which brothels they were visiting, how they balanced wives and lovers, and what they got up to in the gymnasium. Delving into the literature, art and artefacts of the ancient world, from sex toys to seduction tips to kink, Dr Jean Menzies instead centres women and their desire. In doing so, she uncovers the many faces of women's sexuality over the course of thousands of years, and asks intriguing, and sometimes provocative questions about women, sex and desire today.
In APHRODISIA, Dr Jean Menzies dives into the hidden history of women's sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. The classical world stretched across the Mediterranean for more than a millennium, its people and cultures wide and varied and its sexual proclivities equally so. Yet so often when we read about sex in antiquity it is about the men folk first and which brothels they were visiting, how they balanced wives and lovers, and what they got up to in the gymnasium. Delving into the literature, art and artefacts of the ancient world, from sex toys to seduction tips to kink, Dr Jean Menzies instead centres women and their desire. In doing so, she uncovers the many faces of women's sexuality over the course of thousands of years, and asks intriguing, and sometimes provocative questions about women, sex and desire today.
228 pages, Hardcover
Published May 7, 2026
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May 17, 2026
"Women's lives are vast and complex. This was as much tue two millennia ago as it is today. And sex and pleasure are a part of that. It is too easy, too lazy, to dismiss sex as an unimportant facet of society. Worse yet, the sex lives of women, because our predecessors considered them inferior. But there is power in sexuality. There is power in pleasure and joy. There is power in women celebrating themselves as sexual beings in a world that so often sees them as sexual objects."
Aphrodisia is a book about women's sexual lives, pleasures and passions in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Menzies – relying on ancient evidence from poems to paintings to vases to love spells – explores a variety of topics: women writers and their words on passion and sex, sexual medicine, sexual laws, ancient dating and sex manuals, the interconnectedness of sex and religion, the sexual escapades of Imperial women in Rome, ancient sex toys and sexual taboos such as sapphic sex.
Aphrodisia was a banging (heh) good time. It is a much needed, frank and honest exploration of women's sexuality and women's pleasure. A lot of the time, when it comes to sex and sexuality history of antiquity, the focus is on men, partly because there's so much more evidence left of what men thought and felt and wanted and partly because the default focus of historians is still so often men. I really appreciated what Menzies did with this book and I am happy that a book like this exists in the popular history space. It's well-researched and reliable, but it is also very accessible, written in a very conversational tone with Menzies directly addressing you, the reader, and guiding you gently but frankly through this topic that is still associated with shame and secrecy, making references to contemporary movies, music and TV shows along the way. Menzies's love and passion for the topic of her book really shines through in her writing, which made the reading experience even better. As someone who has read quite a bit about the history of sex/sexuality and ancient women, I would've happily spent more time with each topic and gotten even further into the nitty-gritty, but I acknowledge that this book is meant for a popular audience. It is meant to be accessible to everyone from beginners to veterans. I loved this quote at the end, about what this book is all about and what Menzies wanted to say with it – I'm going to hide it cause even though it is not really a spoiler, I do not feel comfortable sharing the final words of any book:
There were lots of topics discussed in this book that I was already familiar with, but I also learned a lot. I love Sappho and I have read Sulpicia's poems (though I did not know she seems to have had the same patron as Ovid and Tibullus!) but I had never heard of Nossis, a 3rd century BC poet with more than 10 epigrams attributed to her. I knew the basics of what the Hippocratic Corpus had to say about women's sexuality, but I appreciated the way Menzies' deepened my understanding of the topic: she described, for example, how the Corpus depicts women as passive subjects to their desires and bodies and how, even though the Corpus does discuss female arousal, the goal is never to say that Hey, some should be getting orgasms. No, the baseline of all discussions in the Corpus is that women are sexually voracious and that the best way to keep women healthy is to marry them off so they can have sex with a husband and hopefully get pregnant. I had no idea about the tradition of wife-sharing and polyamory in Sparta – there is evidence from authors like Xenophon that, in Sparta, a man could have sex and children with a married woman if her husband agreed to it (there is no evidence of what the women felt about it, but Menzies quotes a historian, Sarah B Pomeroy, who has asserted that considering the more free role of women in Sparta and how outspoken they could be it would be strange if these women who were shared never voiced any opinions about it at all). I knew of sex and dating manuals like Ovid's Ars Amatoria, but I didn't know that there's evidence of women-authored sex/dating manuals, such as the 13-times mentioned book by Philaenis and a guide by Elephantis, whose book Tiberius apparently took with him and made part of his infamous sex library on Capri. I've read quite a bit about the intertwined nature of ancient religion and sex, but I had never specifically read about the Aidoneia, a festival for Aphrodite and her mortal lover, Adonis. Menzies does a great job explaining how all-encompassing religion was in antiquity and how, though it can sound weird to us now, sex was a huge part of religion. Sex was the domain of the gods, people prayed to divinities like Aphrodite when they were in love or horny, sex was a key aspect of mythology and religion allowed for a different kind of sexual expression and celebration while also giving marginalized groups possibilities of power and influence. Sure, religion could also be used to control sex (like the demand of virginity with Vestal Virgins), but religion wasn't primarily against sexual expression like it has so often been throughout history.
One of the central themes of Menzies's book – a theme I really appreciated – was how women's lives and experiences were so much more complex than people, historians and otherwise, often give them credit for. For example, while it is accurate to say that women were legally oppressed in antiquity, it is far from fair to claim that women faced exactly the same levels of legal oppression in all Greek city states. In Athens, women couldn't own property and if they were their father's only child, they inherited, though only in name (they held on to the property for their future sons or husband). Athenian women could petition for a divorce (or their dad could do it for them), but they had no such legal protections in divorce cases as the women of the polis of Gortyn, where women not only walked away from their ex-husband with all they owned as they entered the marriage, half of what the household produced during their union and half of the handicrafts they made, they also had the legal right to refuse a husband. In Athens and Gortyn, adultery and an unmarried woman having sex with a man was considered criminal (moicheia) but in Sparta, there seems to have been no laws regarding adultery. Roman women had generally more freedom than Greek women, but that also depended heavily on the status of the Roman woman in question. Imperial women, for example, had unprecedented levels of influence and political power, but their sex lives became prominent source of gossip, weapons to tear them down and something they, in cases like Messalina's, died because. While women's job was, for most of history including antiquity, to birth children, contraception seems to have been openly discussed and relatively available in antiquity, giving women some degree of bodily autonomy and say over what happens to their bodies. I loved this quote from Menzies about how important it is to approach the history of ancient women with respect to its complexity and multifacetedness: "This flattening of history is unhelpful. It neglects the compleity of women's lives and erases what passions and power they did have, even if they did not possess equal status with men. Is that not a disservice to the women of the past in itself?"
As a queer woman, I was intrigued by all the stuff I learned about queer history, even though some of it was quite depressing and bleak. I could've read pages and pages more about the Greek Magical Papyri (the PGM collection) and the two sapphic spells that survive, one by a woman called Heraeis who wishes to attract Sarapias, and another by a woman named Sophia who is in love with Gorgonia. It's strange to think how these two utterly private spells, cast in desperate lust and love, survive to us, despite them never being intended to be seen by anyone. It was sad and frustrating reading all the nasty things ancient male authors had to say about sapphic women and sapphic sex – scholar Eva Cantarella describes Lucian's depiction of sapphic women as "caricatures of maleness" and Phaedrus from Macedonia (in the 1st century CE) recounted a story of how Prometheus got drunk in the middle of fashioning humans and accidentally attached female parts to bodies of "masculine sex" and vice versa, accidentally creating lesbians and gays. Queer people are, in this story, a drunken mistake. Lesbian sex was also depicted as a seemingly titillating thing to ogle at in drinking cups mainly used in all-male symposiums – lesbian sex might be seen as an abomination, but it was okay if it was meant to excite a man. But Menzies also highlights how queer people always existed and persisted, even in a world that deemed their love unnatural. Sappho wrote openly about her love for women and her passion for them, and she prayed to Aphrodite, who responded to her, in her poems, with empathy and camraderie – and this was despite some voices, throughout antiquity, claiming that lesbian sex was an affront to Aphrodite. As Menzies puts it, "–it indicates that who Aphrodite represented was up for grabs."
Menzies also does a great job highlighting how we are still having the same conversations and how people still have some similar misconceptions as the people of antiquity. Menzies references, when discussing the ancients' distaste for cunnilingus (Galen ranks it as one of the worst deviances, superseded only by the eating of faeces, and Martial claims cunnilingus is only performed by men whose penises no longer work or don't have a penis at all), modern message boards online where men discuss whether performing oral sex is "beta". Women in positions of power and political influence still have to deal with sex-based abuse from people: while in antiquity sexual rumours took down empresses and people scribbled sexually demeaning poems about them, today women have to deal with deepfake porn and stuff like that created about them. While Ovid's Ars Amatoria might have been, at least in part, a political satire to piss of Augustus, some men of the manosphere today see him as a genuine inspiration and follow his advice to cross women's boundaries and to not take no for an answer. Ovid's advice for women to fake an orgasm to please their partner is also way too familiar for many women still today. Homophobes still see lesbian women as somehow innately mannish and lesbian sex is still fetishised by heterosexual men.
I am giving this book "only" 4/5 stars because, well, I just don't think it was a new favorite nonfiction book and because I think, at some points, the writing was perhaps a bit too conversational for my taste (this is a very subjective thing and something I don't particularly fault Menzies for – it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with a really conversational tone). I also think it was bizarre that the chapter on religion and sex did not mention, pretty much at all, the cult of Dionysos and how that cult specifically was known as a space where women could express themselves, rise to power and, if the rumours are true, indulge in their sexuality. That was perhaps the only "omission" that I was a bit bummed out by.
Otherwise, I thought the book was sold, entertaining, interesting and definitely something I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of sex and sexuality, of women, or of the ancient world. You don't need to have any prior knowledge of antiquity to read this book – Menzies tells you everything you need to know and even includes a handy "who's who" section near the end where she gives you the basics of who all the major people, from emperors to poets to medical professionals, she writes about were. I will be keeping an eye out for whatever Menzies publishes next.
Interesting facts I learned:
- The Greek word "Orgao" (origin of the word "orgasm") doesn't mean what "orgasm" means today. It means, instead, many things: to grow ripe, to swell with lust or moisture, to desire, to be eager and ready, to be influenced by passion and to be excited.
- Midwifery and all things women's reproductive health was pretty much exclusively a female field in antiquity. The Hippocratic Corpus even states: "You should not treat what women say about childbirth with scepticism, for they always say the saame, and they are talking about something they know."
- Olive oil was suggested as a contraceptive well into the early 1900s.
- When Pompeii's brothel was opened for visitors, only men were allowed in, just like only men were allowed to visit Museum Secretums, aka secret collections of sexually explicit objects many big museums had.
- While Aphrodite was the top dog of all sexuality-related gods and goddesses, there were others: Anteros represented requited love, Himeros was the god of unrequited love while Pothos was in charge of desire and passion.
- The women-only festival Adonia (a celebration/lamentation for Adonis and Aphrodite) was not state-sanctioned in Athens, but this did not stop women of all classes, from slaves to nobility, from drinking, partying and dancing. Though there were rumours of sexual excess during the festival, there is no concrete evidence for any ritual sexual escapades.
- There is little to no evidence of "sacred prostitution" in antiquity. Most sources we have are highly biased accounts written by Greeks about non-Greeks and how barbaric they were .
- Catherine the Great of Russia – an imperial woman with a shitload of strange and untrue sexual rumours about her, including her supposed death while having sex with a horse (she died of a stroke) – was called the Messalina of the North.
- There's evidence of dildos from 28 000 years ago – a time before money or writing.
- There is a long-standing myth that many dildos in the ancient world were made of bread. There is no substantial evidence to support this myth.
- There is evidence from Rome, 197 CE, of a woman, Cassia, petitioning the court to have adultery laws changed to also encompass men who sleep around. The reply indicates her petition was ignored, but it shines a light on an otherwise unknown women who was annoyed at the double-standards of her society and tried to make a change.
- Dildos were specifically linked to women. There are no surviving depictions of men using them on their own or together. There's even a depiction, in Pseudo-Lucian's Amores, of what sounds very much like a strap-on between used two women.
- Agalmatophilia means a sexual attraction to statues.
- Co-emperors Justinian and Maximian issued a law that criminalised forcing anyone – man or woman - to marry or to reconcile with their former spouse.
- Seneca the Younger claimed that medical professionals said that if a woman has sex with another woman, she might lose her hair and get gout.
Aphrodisia is a book about women's sexual lives, pleasures and passions in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Menzies – relying on ancient evidence from poems to paintings to vases to love spells – explores a variety of topics: women writers and their words on passion and sex, sexual medicine, sexual laws, ancient dating and sex manuals, the interconnectedness of sex and religion, the sexual escapades of Imperial women in Rome, ancient sex toys and sexual taboos such as sapphic sex.
Aphrodisia was a banging (heh) good time. It is a much needed, frank and honest exploration of women's sexuality and women's pleasure. A lot of the time, when it comes to sex and sexuality history of antiquity, the focus is on men, partly because there's so much more evidence left of what men thought and felt and wanted and partly because the default focus of historians is still so often men. I really appreciated what Menzies did with this book and I am happy that a book like this exists in the popular history space. It's well-researched and reliable, but it is also very accessible, written in a very conversational tone with Menzies directly addressing you, the reader, and guiding you gently but frankly through this topic that is still associated with shame and secrecy, making references to contemporary movies, music and TV shows along the way. Menzies's love and passion for the topic of her book really shines through in her writing, which made the reading experience even better. As someone who has read quite a bit about the history of sex/sexuality and ancient women, I would've happily spent more time with each topic and gotten even further into the nitty-gritty, but I acknowledge that this book is meant for a popular audience. It is meant to be accessible to everyone from beginners to veterans. I loved this quote at the end, about what this book is all about and what Menzies wanted to say with it – I'm going to hide it cause even though it is not really a spoiler, I do not feel comfortable sharing the final words of any book:
There were lots of topics discussed in this book that I was already familiar with, but I also learned a lot. I love Sappho and I have read Sulpicia's poems (though I did not know she seems to have had the same patron as Ovid and Tibullus!) but I had never heard of Nossis, a 3rd century BC poet with more than 10 epigrams attributed to her. I knew the basics of what the Hippocratic Corpus had to say about women's sexuality, but I appreciated the way Menzies' deepened my understanding of the topic: she described, for example, how the Corpus depicts women as passive subjects to their desires and bodies and how, even though the Corpus does discuss female arousal, the goal is never to say that Hey, some should be getting orgasms. No, the baseline of all discussions in the Corpus is that women are sexually voracious and that the best way to keep women healthy is to marry them off so they can have sex with a husband and hopefully get pregnant. I had no idea about the tradition of wife-sharing and polyamory in Sparta – there is evidence from authors like Xenophon that, in Sparta, a man could have sex and children with a married woman if her husband agreed to it (there is no evidence of what the women felt about it, but Menzies quotes a historian, Sarah B Pomeroy, who has asserted that considering the more free role of women in Sparta and how outspoken they could be it would be strange if these women who were shared never voiced any opinions about it at all). I knew of sex and dating manuals like Ovid's Ars Amatoria, but I didn't know that there's evidence of women-authored sex/dating manuals, such as the 13-times mentioned book by Philaenis and a guide by Elephantis, whose book Tiberius apparently took with him and made part of his infamous sex library on Capri. I've read quite a bit about the intertwined nature of ancient religion and sex, but I had never specifically read about the Aidoneia, a festival for Aphrodite and her mortal lover, Adonis. Menzies does a great job explaining how all-encompassing religion was in antiquity and how, though it can sound weird to us now, sex was a huge part of religion. Sex was the domain of the gods, people prayed to divinities like Aphrodite when they were in love or horny, sex was a key aspect of mythology and religion allowed for a different kind of sexual expression and celebration while also giving marginalized groups possibilities of power and influence. Sure, religion could also be used to control sex (like the demand of virginity with Vestal Virgins), but religion wasn't primarily against sexual expression like it has so often been throughout history.
One of the central themes of Menzies's book – a theme I really appreciated – was how women's lives and experiences were so much more complex than people, historians and otherwise, often give them credit for. For example, while it is accurate to say that women were legally oppressed in antiquity, it is far from fair to claim that women faced exactly the same levels of legal oppression in all Greek city states. In Athens, women couldn't own property and if they were their father's only child, they inherited, though only in name (they held on to the property for their future sons or husband). Athenian women could petition for a divorce (or their dad could do it for them), but they had no such legal protections in divorce cases as the women of the polis of Gortyn, where women not only walked away from their ex-husband with all they owned as they entered the marriage, half of what the household produced during their union and half of the handicrafts they made, they also had the legal right to refuse a husband. In Athens and Gortyn, adultery and an unmarried woman having sex with a man was considered criminal (moicheia) but in Sparta, there seems to have been no laws regarding adultery. Roman women had generally more freedom than Greek women, but that also depended heavily on the status of the Roman woman in question. Imperial women, for example, had unprecedented levels of influence and political power, but their sex lives became prominent source of gossip, weapons to tear them down and something they, in cases like Messalina's, died because. While women's job was, for most of history including antiquity, to birth children, contraception seems to have been openly discussed and relatively available in antiquity, giving women some degree of bodily autonomy and say over what happens to their bodies. I loved this quote from Menzies about how important it is to approach the history of ancient women with respect to its complexity and multifacetedness: "This flattening of history is unhelpful. It neglects the compleity of women's lives and erases what passions and power they did have, even if they did not possess equal status with men. Is that not a disservice to the women of the past in itself?"
As a queer woman, I was intrigued by all the stuff I learned about queer history, even though some of it was quite depressing and bleak. I could've read pages and pages more about the Greek Magical Papyri (the PGM collection) and the two sapphic spells that survive, one by a woman called Heraeis who wishes to attract Sarapias, and another by a woman named Sophia who is in love with Gorgonia. It's strange to think how these two utterly private spells, cast in desperate lust and love, survive to us, despite them never being intended to be seen by anyone. It was sad and frustrating reading all the nasty things ancient male authors had to say about sapphic women and sapphic sex – scholar Eva Cantarella describes Lucian's depiction of sapphic women as "caricatures of maleness" and Phaedrus from Macedonia (in the 1st century CE) recounted a story of how Prometheus got drunk in the middle of fashioning humans and accidentally attached female parts to bodies of "masculine sex" and vice versa, accidentally creating lesbians and gays. Queer people are, in this story, a drunken mistake. Lesbian sex was also depicted as a seemingly titillating thing to ogle at in drinking cups mainly used in all-male symposiums – lesbian sex might be seen as an abomination, but it was okay if it was meant to excite a man. But Menzies also highlights how queer people always existed and persisted, even in a world that deemed their love unnatural. Sappho wrote openly about her love for women and her passion for them, and she prayed to Aphrodite, who responded to her, in her poems, with empathy and camraderie – and this was despite some voices, throughout antiquity, claiming that lesbian sex was an affront to Aphrodite. As Menzies puts it, "–it indicates that who Aphrodite represented was up for grabs."
Menzies also does a great job highlighting how we are still having the same conversations and how people still have some similar misconceptions as the people of antiquity. Menzies references, when discussing the ancients' distaste for cunnilingus (Galen ranks it as one of the worst deviances, superseded only by the eating of faeces, and Martial claims cunnilingus is only performed by men whose penises no longer work or don't have a penis at all), modern message boards online where men discuss whether performing oral sex is "beta". Women in positions of power and political influence still have to deal with sex-based abuse from people: while in antiquity sexual rumours took down empresses and people scribbled sexually demeaning poems about them, today women have to deal with deepfake porn and stuff like that created about them. While Ovid's Ars Amatoria might have been, at least in part, a political satire to piss of Augustus, some men of the manosphere today see him as a genuine inspiration and follow his advice to cross women's boundaries and to not take no for an answer. Ovid's advice for women to fake an orgasm to please their partner is also way too familiar for many women still today. Homophobes still see lesbian women as somehow innately mannish and lesbian sex is still fetishised by heterosexual men.
I am giving this book "only" 4/5 stars because, well, I just don't think it was a new favorite nonfiction book and because I think, at some points, the writing was perhaps a bit too conversational for my taste (this is a very subjective thing and something I don't particularly fault Menzies for – it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with a really conversational tone). I also think it was bizarre that the chapter on religion and sex did not mention, pretty much at all, the cult of Dionysos and how that cult specifically was known as a space where women could express themselves, rise to power and, if the rumours are true, indulge in their sexuality. That was perhaps the only "omission" that I was a bit bummed out by.
Otherwise, I thought the book was sold, entertaining, interesting and definitely something I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of sex and sexuality, of women, or of the ancient world. You don't need to have any prior knowledge of antiquity to read this book – Menzies tells you everything you need to know and even includes a handy "who's who" section near the end where she gives you the basics of who all the major people, from emperors to poets to medical professionals, she writes about were. I will be keeping an eye out for whatever Menzies publishes next.
Interesting facts I learned:
- The Greek word "Orgao" (origin of the word "orgasm") doesn't mean what "orgasm" means today. It means, instead, many things: to grow ripe, to swell with lust or moisture, to desire, to be eager and ready, to be influenced by passion and to be excited.
- Midwifery and all things women's reproductive health was pretty much exclusively a female field in antiquity. The Hippocratic Corpus even states: "You should not treat what women say about childbirth with scepticism, for they always say the saame, and they are talking about something they know."
- Olive oil was suggested as a contraceptive well into the early 1900s.
- When Pompeii's brothel was opened for visitors, only men were allowed in, just like only men were allowed to visit Museum Secretums, aka secret collections of sexually explicit objects many big museums had.
- While Aphrodite was the top dog of all sexuality-related gods and goddesses, there were others: Anteros represented requited love, Himeros was the god of unrequited love while Pothos was in charge of desire and passion.
- The women-only festival Adonia (a celebration/lamentation for Adonis and Aphrodite) was not state-sanctioned in Athens, but this did not stop women of all classes, from slaves to nobility, from drinking, partying and dancing. Though there were rumours of sexual excess during the festival, there is no concrete evidence for any ritual sexual escapades.
- There is little to no evidence of "sacred prostitution" in antiquity. Most sources we have are highly biased accounts written by Greeks about non-Greeks and how barbaric they were .
- Catherine the Great of Russia – an imperial woman with a shitload of strange and untrue sexual rumours about her, including her supposed death while having sex with a horse (she died of a stroke) – was called the Messalina of the North.
- There's evidence of dildos from 28 000 years ago – a time before money or writing.
- There is a long-standing myth that many dildos in the ancient world were made of bread. There is no substantial evidence to support this myth.
- There is evidence from Rome, 197 CE, of a woman, Cassia, petitioning the court to have adultery laws changed to also encompass men who sleep around. The reply indicates her petition was ignored, but it shines a light on an otherwise unknown women who was annoyed at the double-standards of her society and tried to make a change.
- Dildos were specifically linked to women. There are no surviving depictions of men using them on their own or together. There's even a depiction, in Pseudo-Lucian's Amores, of what sounds very much like a strap-on between used two women.
- Agalmatophilia means a sexual attraction to statues.
- Co-emperors Justinian and Maximian issued a law that criminalised forcing anyone – man or woman - to marry or to reconcile with their former spouse.
- Seneca the Younger claimed that medical professionals said that if a woman has sex with another woman, she might lose her hair and get gout.
May 21, 2026
I have been following Jean Menzies on Youtube for a while because her taste in books is immaculate. Thus, I was really excited when she announced that she would have a book coming out that talks about women in Ancient Greece and Rome. I have always had an interest in history and would consider myself an avid feminist. This book perfectly met my expectations. And it also helped that by now I have the author's voice memorised from her Youtube videos, making it sound like an audiobook in my head.
I really enjoyed the plethora of topics this book discusses. Menzies manages to include all the important topics regarding sex and does so in an engaging way that even a person with only basic knowledge on Ancient Greece and Rome would understand. She is also not afraid to criticise other scholars for their ignorance in regards to ancient women and their sexuality.
The only critique I have is that I would have preferred the book to be written less colloquially, but that is just personal preference, and that I think Menzies, like many others who enter the classics, have a passion and love for the ancient times, so much so that they allow their view to sometime muddle the facts. While Menzies definitely doesn’t do this too much or overtly, it sometimes becomes clear when she mentions an old friend telling her that it must’ve sucked to be an ancient woman. Here, Menzies mentions that “It neglects the complexity of women’s lives and erases what passions and power they did have, even if they did not possess equal status with men.” (52). While, yes, ancient women lived complex lives and certainly explored their sexuality while living lives separate from men, I don’t think the idea that ancient women’s lives must’ve been ‘bad’ is wrong. People will always compare their own lived experience to that of others, and this is especially true when it comes to making comparisons. Thus, comparing an ancient woman’s life to that of a modern woman in Italy or Greece, they certainly had it bad. Even if we don’t compare their lives to modern women and instead to other women of similar times, how much you could enjoy your life greatly depended on your social status.
Nevertheless, I think Aphrodisia is a great addition to already existing works on women in Ancient Greece and Rome. It is accessible and explores a variety of topics on sex and masturbation and provides a great overview on how varied sex could have been in the ancient times instead of the modern idea that ancient sex was always heterosexual and heteronormative.
I really enjoyed the plethora of topics this book discusses. Menzies manages to include all the important topics regarding sex and does so in an engaging way that even a person with only basic knowledge on Ancient Greece and Rome would understand. She is also not afraid to criticise other scholars for their ignorance in regards to ancient women and their sexuality.
The only critique I have is that I would have preferred the book to be written less colloquially, but that is just personal preference, and that I think Menzies, like many others who enter the classics, have a passion and love for the ancient times, so much so that they allow their view to sometime muddle the facts. While Menzies definitely doesn’t do this too much or overtly, it sometimes becomes clear when she mentions an old friend telling her that it must’ve sucked to be an ancient woman. Here, Menzies mentions that “It neglects the complexity of women’s lives and erases what passions and power they did have, even if they did not possess equal status with men.” (52). While, yes, ancient women lived complex lives and certainly explored their sexuality while living lives separate from men, I don’t think the idea that ancient women’s lives must’ve been ‘bad’ is wrong. People will always compare their own lived experience to that of others, and this is especially true when it comes to making comparisons. Thus, comparing an ancient woman’s life to that of a modern woman in Italy or Greece, they certainly had it bad. Even if we don’t compare their lives to modern women and instead to other women of similar times, how much you could enjoy your life greatly depended on your social status.
Nevertheless, I think Aphrodisia is a great addition to already existing works on women in Ancient Greece and Rome. It is accessible and explores a variety of topics on sex and masturbation and provides a great overview on how varied sex could have been in the ancient times instead of the modern idea that ancient sex was always heterosexual and heteronormative.
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