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Controlling Desires Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome
Kirk Ormand
ISBN: 0-275-98880-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98880-7
312 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 11/30/2008
List Price: $49.95 (UK Sterling Price: £34.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Ebook
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • "Ormand's wide-ranging analysis, from Homer, Plato, Sappho, and Aristophanes to Plautus, Cicero, Ovid, and Petronius adds an additional level of insight into traditional classical studies."
    —College & Research Libraries News     5/1/2009
Description: 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.
Table of Contents:
  • Series Foreword by Bella Vivante
    Preface
    Chapter 1: Introduction
    Chapter 2: Homer, Hesiod, and Greek Lyric Poetry
    Chapter 3: Sexual Rroles and Ssexual Rrules in Cclassical Athens
    Chapter 4: Sexuality in Greek Comedy
    Chapter Five: Legal and illegal sex
    Chapter 6: Philosophical sex
    Chapter 7: Love and sex in Hellenistic Poetry
    Chapter 8: Rome and Roman sex
    Chapter 9: Roman Comic Sex
    Chapter 10: Legal and illegal sex in ancient Rome
    Chapter 11: Roman poetry about love and/or sex
    Chapter 12: Excursus: Lesbians in Ovids Metamorphoses
    Chapter 13: Imperial Sex: Nero and Seneca
    Chapter 14: Sex in satire and invective poetry
    Chapter 15: Epilogue
About the Author: KIRK ORMAND is Associate Professor of Classics at Oberlin College and author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999).
PDF Catalogs:
Praeger Public Library Spring 2009.pdf
Academic Library Spring 2009.pdf
Academic Library Fall 2008.pdf
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