Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome

Praeger Series on the Ancient World

by Kirk Ormand

Historians of ancient Greece and Rome are sometimes hesitant to engage with the well-documented fact that Greek and Roman men regularly engaged in same-sex sexual relations with younger men. In a similar vein, scholars have constructed elaborate social explanations for Sappho, a 6th-century woman from the island of Lesbos who wrote passionate poetry about her erotic relations with a number of women, in order to avoid her apparent sexual orientation. On the other hand, in recent times the Greeks and Romans have occasionally been idealized as prototypes of modern homosexuality or bisexuality. In this engaging, cross-disciplinary book, Ormand argues that the Greeks and Romans thought of sex and sexuality in ways fundamentally different from our own. Ormand's exploration of Greek and Roman sexual practice allows readers the opportunity to see how attitudes and beliefs about sex―sexuality, in short―functioned in the early civilizations of the West, and how those attitudes reveal the unspoken rules that defined public and private behavior.

Ormand treats Greece and Rome in separate sections, with ample cross-references and comparisons. Within each section, individual chapters focus on different types of texts and visual arts. Just as sexuality is presented differently in our legal cases than it is on television sitcoms, or supermarket tabloids, the reader will naturally find that the Greeks and Romans talk one way about sex, love, and marriage in legal speeches and another way in comedies, satires, and philosophical texts. Ormand's analysis takes into account changes in attitude over time, as well as different modes of presenting a complex and interconnected set of social beliefs and behaviors.

Genres: History, LGBT, Nonfiction, Sexuality

312 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2008

Reviews

[Sam Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't be intimidated by the topic, this book is totally accessible and readable. Whether you are interested in the ancient world or just in better contextualizing contemporary ideas about sexuality, this book is great. He gives plenty of examples, and provides some endnotes to further reading, but it seems clear he intended for this book to be read by beginners as well as academics, and keeps the prose light and readable while walking you through concepts that will let you talk about this easily with experts.

[Eleanor! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirk is, as ever, a brilliant, thorough, & insightful scholar of sexuality in the ancient world

[king bitchard 💜 · Rating 4 out of 5]

me reading a book about sex: whag the fuck theres sex in here

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, I love the cover of this revised edition. It’s way better than the original edition.

Ok, now that that is out of the way, this books was very readable, informative, interesting and well paced. It does not require much background knowledge on Ancient Greece and Rome but readers who have read up on other topics in classical history won’t be bored. A basic outline is given in the back, but most historical events are only discussed if they are relevant to the understanding of sexuality or gender. I mentioned gender because although this book is ostensibly a discussion on sexuality anytime Ormand gets close to identifying an ancient person or type of person with a modern category of sexuality he changes course and instead call them a gender variant. While I understand the difficulties and inherent problems with assign modern sexualities and gender categories to ancient people, I think Ormand goes a little too far. After all, he also concludes that what defines a man in Roman society is different than what defines a man today, but no one argues against calling all roman males men regardless of how the Romans would have thought of them. He may be trying hard to divorce these ancient sexualities from the modern LGBTQ+ rights movements for ideological reasons as in a one off comment towards the end he states the in the Bible, Paul unambiguously condemns gay sex. This is after he explicitly has stated that the words we identify with homosexual relate to gender variants and self control more than sexual behavior. So I found that a bit of a flip flop...

I do think that even if we accept that ancient notions of sexuality were completely different from our current categories it is still important to note that queer sexualities existed in the ancient world. There were people who didn’t fit into binary gender categories in the ancient world. Homosexual desire existed. Exclusive homosexual desire existed. Models for asexual relationships existed. Female homosexual desire existed. Women who preformed masculinity existed. Men who preformed femininity existed.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely helpful academic book for understanding Ancient Greek and Roman sexuality time-period by time-period, genre/media-by genre/media. I probably should have written this review chapter-by-chapter, but let's see if I can remember the very basic main points of this 450-something page book.

As the title suggests, Ancient Greeks and Romans are very concerned with establishing self-control over all aspects of their lives, and this includes sex. A lack of self-control may be marked by too much sex or the wrong kind of sex, but nobody really cares all that much about the sex itself; it's all about the lack of self-control the sex REPRESENTS.

The axis of ancient sexuality is more or less penetrator/penetratee, and it doesn't matter what gender the penetratee is (as opposed to modern sexuality for which gender is the main category).

Greek (or rather Athenian) sexuality caters to elite men, but elite men were once elite boys, who would provide (so long as they don't TALK about it) sexual favors for elite men, but weren't supposed to enjoy it. Then, when they become elite men, it's perfectly expected that the cycle continues.

Roman sexuality is never sex-between-equals. Roman elite men can penetrate literally anyone who is NOT a citizen, in whatever way they want, and that's fine. For Roman elite men to be penetrated is seen by society at large as demeaning, but gender in general is not the issue.

I really found interesting one of the later points about the Greek novel, where there's a giant shift from the idea of Eros as a source of Major Trouble to a positive force that keeps young people in love together (but virginal, because of their valorous self-control) through all manner of difficulty (e.g., pirates) until they can make it home and get parental permission to get married.

Overall, this is an excellent book, and I will doubtless come back to specific chapters as necessary.

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this for anyone curious about the history of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. Well-written with numerous, thoughtfully translated excerpts. Very interesting to see the seeds of our modern perceptions of gender roles and sexual norms as well as the many, often surprising differences. Plenty of fun sex facts and lewd poems to shock and amuse your friends with :)

[Norah Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In this book, I outline the basic structures of sexual practice and the fundamental categories through which the Greeks and Romans understood the world of sexual behavior."

Oberlin classics professor Kirk Ormand shines a light on classical Greek and Roman sexual beliefs, rules, and practices in this illuminating book. Not only is Controlling Desires illuminating in its own right, but it will also bring clarity to anything else one reads about sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

For example, the most interesting thing I learned from the book was that according to the predominant ancient Greek view of sexuality, all people had the potential to be attracted to any gender or to have any sexual preference. If one had "too much" sex or the "wrong kind" of sex, the view went, one would become more and more hedonistic and seek out more and more extreme activities as they succombed to "sexual excess."

According to Ormand, the ancient Greeks viewed the sexual appetite as analogous to the appetite for food (and sexual excess as analogous to overeating) in the sense that each could be directed toward a wide range of things, healthy or unhealthy, and that moderation and self-discipline were important for reigning in each appetite and avoiding each form of excess.

This obviously differs a great deal from the modern concept of sexual orientation, which sees sexual desire as working within a smaller range (most people only report experiencing, or being able to experience, sexual attraction/desire/etc. toward one gender and not toward others), doesn't associate any sexual orientations with excess (i.e., acknowledges the possibility of, for example, being a gay man whose sex life is free of excess and perhaps even relatively conventional), and sees sexual orientations as fixed and longstanding (i.e., unlikely to undergo significant change).

Knowing that the ancient Greeks didn't have a concept of sexual orientation like ours, and knowing what their alternative understanding of sexuality was, will be useful whenever I'm reading about sexuality and ancient Greece in the future. Controlling Desires provides a comprehensive, informative, and accessible account of what sexuality was like in the ancient Greco-Roman world, and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in sexuality or classical studies.

By the way, I love the cover art that the University of Texas Press put on the second edition. (The cover that Goodreads currently uses is of the first edition.) It's colorful and has a nice script font. Very pretty. Buy the second edition, it'll look nice on your shelf!

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting! I love how much can be learnt about the general culture, lifestyle, and popular figures of Ancient Greece and Rome, despite ostensibly viewing everything through the lens of sexuality. My favourite parts were the sections on the Ancient Greek lyric poets (some of whom obviously found misogyny irresistible...), the hilarious plays of Aristophanes, and the entire chapter on Emperor Nero.

'The beginning of the list of crimes deals almost exclusively with Nero's appearances on stage, his dramatic performances, and his trips to Greece, in which he caused the Olympic Games to be held in an off year (67CE) and introduced a singing competition, which he entered and, to no one's surprise, won.'

'The various pieces of the puzzle come into place. It is not just that Nero liked to have sex with boys; rather, his obsession with Poppaea extended beyond her death, and in a desperate manoeuvre, he replaced her with a castrated freedman who looked just like her.'

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for class

it’s a bit tedious and i’m not the biggest fan of ancient greek history, which large parts of this deal with, but it was pretty interesting nevertheless