The Latin Sexual Vocabulary

by James Noel Adams

Like other languages, Latin had a group of words which speakers regarded as basic obscenities, as well as a rich stock of sexual euphemisms and metaphors. At the lower end of the social and stylistic scale, evidence for Latin sexual terminology comes from numerous graffiti. On the other hand, certain literary genres had marked sexual content. This book collects for the first time the evidence provided by both literary and non-literary sources from the early Republic down to about the fourth century Ad. Separate chapters are given to each of the sexual parts of the body, and to the terminology used to describe sexual acts. General topics treated include lexical differences between various literary genres, the influence of Greek and Latin, diachronic changes within the vocabulary, and the weakening of sexual words into general terms of abuse.

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference, Linguistics, History, Language

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who works on Latin poetry, especially genres like love elegy and satire, will find this indispensable. Adams goes beyond the OLD and gives us a compendium of sexual or sexualised terms from Latin literature, including euphemisms and metaphorical usages. He supplements this with examples of texts from across the canon.

The organisation makes this particularly useful as it is indexed by Greek or Latin term, by text in the index locorum and, if you still can't find what you want, a general index.

So if you need to justify obscene or eroticised readings of words, or find out whether the Roman used 'die' as a sexual metaphor as later cultures do, or simply want to browse dirty words in Latin (!) this is wonderful. It is, now, a bit dated: Adams, for example, refuses to accept Catullus' 'passer' as 'penis' (though, oddly, he's happy to accept Martial's dove).

For anyone writing on Latin poetry, this is invaluable.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really useful analysis of the Latin words used to write about sex. Appendix at the end gives other terms used in scatological humour, etc. Gives explanation of words which are not entirely sexual in use - also a very good read for analysis of the language of insult.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful to the scholar, and kind of fun, too.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a quite extensive philological examination of sexual terminology in Latin, covering every word that has come down to us in ancient literature. It gives etymological origins whenever possible, as a great many terms came into Latin from Greek, and he also gives us common euphemisms and circumlocutions used whenever the terms themselves were to be avoided. The core of the book is divided into four sections: "Mentula and its synonyms," "Designations of the female genitalia," "Culus and its synonyms," and "The vocabulary relating to sexual acts."

Adams' work is necessary reading for Latinists who wish to understand as much as possible the cruder prose of the satirists, among others. One would not get the most out of Juvenal or Petronius without the familiarity with the vocabulary which this book gives. Curiously, those with an interest in anthropology or sociology might also profit from the work, as so many sexual concepts held to be modern inventions can be traced to Roman times.

If I have one complaint about the book, it is that it shows neither the origin of some items in Proto-Indo-European nor the continuance of this vocabulary in Romance. A mention of how, for example, Latin futuere survives in Spanish joder would have been a great help in putting this aspect of Latin in historical context.

For Latin philologists who desire a greater understanding of the saucier authors, Adam's work is worth reading. Historical linguists, however, will be disappointed by its lack of a diachronic view, as I was. I might also mention that a similar work is available on Greek sexual terms, Henderson's The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy.

[Chuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and serious scholarship.