Daniel H. Garrison

A straightforward academic summary of what we know about sexuality in Ancient Greece from literature, art and archaeology. As anybody who has ever looked at Greek vases in a museum can easily guess, this is a lot more than we know about sexuality in many other ancient cultures, but when you drill down into it there are still a lot of blind spots. Statues and painted pottery are luxury products made for a limited elite; literary references are often satirical, or reflect the ideals of exclusive or counter-cultural sects, so we don’t really know all that much about the sexual habits of (say) working-class Athenians, or married women.

Garrison helps us to get a grasp of what we do know and put it in context, with introductory chapters about Jewish and other middle-eastern cultures and a closing chapter about Hellenistic Christianity, and he takes us through the evolution of Greek depictions of sexuality from Archaic to Hellenistic times. Unlike most other books I’ve read on this subject, he isn’t particularly interested in the way later cultures have responded to (their notions of) what the Greeks got up to in their naughtier moments (or didn’t!), and there’s no overt agenda of criticising the way we see sexuality in our own times. Which probably makes it a more useful book if you’re trying to make sense of Greek literature yourself, but leaves it a little dry for the reader if your interest is more sociological than classical. There are plenty of naughty pictures to look at, though…… (more)