Controlling desires

"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, in order to avoid her apparent sexual orientation, 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. On the other hand, in recent times the Greeks and Romans have occasionally been idealized as prototypes of modem 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 affords readers the opportunity to see how attitudes and beliefs about sex and sexuality functioned in the early civilizations of the West, and how those attitudes reveal the unspoken rules that defined public and private behavior."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.