To browse Academia. It is in some ways irrelevant to my project on sexual discourses whether or not this anecdote is true or not, as it was clearly a story in circulation by the early second century.
Still, given the sourcing, the anecdote is quite likely based upon an actual incident. This is the updated version forthcoming in the updated Companion, which has been pending for some time -- so much time, in fact, that now I need to update the update with reference to Tom Sapsford's new book on the cinaedus and to the collection Un-Roman Sex. What this volume is about: Terms, contexts and topics Much time has passed since scholars were afraid that their papers and lectures about, or pedagogical discussions of, aspects of ancient Greek and Roman sexuality could be seen as inappropriate or even offensive.
Nowadays, a Cambridge Dean, unlike the one mentioned in E. Forster's novel, Maurice, would never ask a student to omit "a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks", i.
What is still relatively understudied in classical scholarship, a battleground where many claims are still contested, is sex and sexual practices themselves. This volume aims to revisit, further explore and, through updated interdisciplinary approaches, shed more light on the textual and non-textual sources that help us reconstruct a clearer, more coherent and precise overarching picture of sex and all the practices related to it in Greco-Roman antiquity.
Let us start with an attempt to explain the use, in this volume, of terminology. There is a term in the subtitle of the volume which is of fundamental importance for marking the purposes and the limits of the content of the present book, which should be given a semantic clarification: sexuality. Sexuality remains a contested notion that cannot be unanimously defined. Foucault, D. Halperin and J. Butler, among other cultural constructionists, point out that it is a modern concept, being the product of acculturation that differs from time to time and from culture to culture, and that any theory about its application in the ancient world is permeated by modern sensibilities.
