Sex and the Ancient City: Sex and Sexual Practices in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Edited by Andreas Serafim, George Kazantzidis, and Kyriakos Demetriou
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes, 2022. 553pp. ISBN 9783110695786.

It is difficult to imagine a title better designed to grab attention than Sex and the Ancient City. One expects either Carrie Bradshaw with a bust of Pericles, or yet another dreary exercise in pseudo-radical gender studies. But this book, running to more than five hundred pages, is weighty and—most importantly—entertaining. At last, a collection of scholarship on Greek and Roman sex that doesn’t blush or collapse into jargon.

I will admit something at the start. I like sex. I like having it, I like thinking about it, and I like reading about it. For most people my age, “reading about sex” means furtively scrolling through porn sites, staring at some American with silicone breasts or a tattooed troglodyte with more muscles than brain cells. For me, it means Aristophanes, Aeschines, Plato, Martial. When I read Sex and the Ancient City, I found myself not only informed but amused and occasionally aroused—not by the acts described (who in his right mind would be aroused by clitoridectomy?), but by the thrill of knowing that I am clever enough to enjoy it all in the original languages. Reading Greek smut is almost as good as sex itself. Almost.

The editors—Andreas Serafim, George Kazantzidis, and Kyriakos Demetriou—begin with an obvious but neglected point: while classical scholarship has been drenched in studies of “gender” and “identity” since Foucault, the acts themselves—the physical mechanics of desire—have been ignored. We have thousands of pages on “cultural constructions of sexuality,” but very little on masturbation, dildos, or ejaculation. This book sets out to redress that balance.

Seven sections cover everything from homoeroticism to disgust. Greece and Rome are treated together, so that differences and continuities emerge. Textual sources are combined with vase paintings, papyri, inscriptions, and statues. Interdisciplinary tools are dragged in—psychology, neuroscience, paralinguistics. Normally, this sort of jargon would be a warning sign. Here, it often works. One of the most memorable chapters is on sneezing: how an untimely sneeze could signal effeminacy (kinaidia). Ridiculous, yes. But precisely the sort of ridiculous that makes one want to keep reading.

The first section revisits the familiar ground of Greek pederasty, but with refreshing bluntness. The television version of Athens presents a rainbow utopia where everyone skipped hand-in-hand to the bathhouse. The reality, as this volume reminds us, was far harsher. Relationships were structured, status-bound, and full of insults.

Plato, in the Symposium, has Pausanias distinguish between “Common Love” and “Heavenly Love”:

Ἔστιν οὖν οὗτος ὁ ἔρως οὐράνιος, καὶ οὐδὲν κοινωνεῖ τῆς γυναικείας· ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸ ἄρρεν ἔστιν, τὸ δὲ ἄρρεν φύσει κρεῖττον. (Symp. 180d–e)

“This is the Heavenly Love, and it has no share in women; it is directed to the male, who by nature is more capable of intelligence and virtue.”

This is the quotation plastered across documentaries. But the same Athens that praised noble love also laughed itself hoarse at effeminacy. Aeschines, prosecuting Timarchus in 346 BC, spat out:

οὐκ ἔστιν Ἀθηναῖος, οὐ ξένος, οὐ δοῦλος, ὅς οὐκ ἔγνω τὴν σὴν ἀκολασίαν. (Against Timarchus 1.131)

“There is no Athenian, no foreigner, no slave who does not know your shame.”

Timarchus’s crime was not that he desired men, but that he had prostituted himself as a boy and enjoyed being penetrated. To be an erastēs, the active lover, was fine. To be an erōmenos past youth, or worse, to be a kinaidos—a man who relished passivity—was shameful. The insult was everywhere. Demosthenes records being slapped and called a kinaidos:

καὶ παίσας με εἶπεν· ‘εἶ κίναιδος, εἶ πόρνη.’ (Against Conon 54.17)

“He struck me and said, ‘You’re a kinaidos, you’re a whore.’”

Reading this is a double pleasure. The filth itself is amusing. But even more satisfying is knowing that I can read it in Greek, while the other boys at my school can barely read the football scores.

Part II of the book plunges into ancient medicine. Chiara Thumiger discusses clitoridectomy—yes, the surgical removal of the clitoris—as recorded by Soranus and Galen. The logic was brutal: sex was defined as penetration, so female pleasure was irrelevant. If pleasure threatened disorder, cut it away. Barbaric, but revealing.

George Kazantzidis examines how Hippocratic medicine connected epilepsy with sex. Semen, if not discharged properly, could ferment in the body and trigger convulsions. It is nonsense, of course. But it is inspired nonsense. The Hippocratic author On the Sacred Disease declares:

ἡ νόσος οὐδαμῶς θειοτέρα τῶν ἄλλων· ἔχει δὲ φύσιν καὶ αἰτίαν ἐκ τῶν ἀνθρώπων. (De morbo sacro 1)

“The disease is no more divine than any other; it has its nature and cause in men.”

For the Greeks, even epilepsy had a sexual explanation. Compared to today’s NHS, which insists that obesity is a “disease” cured by weekly injections, the Hippocratics almost look sensible.

The chapters on sexual objects are simultaneously comic and serious. Emma Stafford catalogues Greek sex toys: leather dildos, wooden phalluses, even bread shaped into rods. Aristophanes makes a joke of it in Lysistrata (109–110), where a woman, deprived of her husband, sighs:

ἤδη μοι τὸν οἶκον ἡδὺς ὁ λουτρὶς ἐγκατέχει.

“Already my household bath-scraper feels sweet to me.”

Regina Höschele examines agalmatophilia—the desire for statues. Ovid’s Metamorphoses has Pygmalion fall in love with his own sculpture. Martial mocks a man for a similar fetish:

Quid quod amat nullas, nisi quas futuit, imagines? (Epigrams 9.41.3)

“What of the man who loves no statues except those he can fuck?”

I admit I laughed out loud. Imagine being so ugly that the only partner who won’t laugh at you is a lump of marble. Half the boys in my school, waddling around in unwashed underwear, should be so lucky.

Other chapters go further into the grotesque. Jeremy McInerney discusses myths linking semen with the earth—ejaculation as a metaphor for autochthony. José Malheiro Magalhães surveys bestiality. These are not the lurid inventions of modern pornographers, but serious cultural anxieties.

Martial again provides the disgust. In Epigram 1.95 he jeers:

Nihil est quod credere de se non possit cuicunque bene cessit.
Sed tu cum tibi, Caecilianus, bene cessit, credis te fututum.”

“There is nothing a man will not believe about himself if things go well for him.
But you, Caecilianus, when things go well, believe you’ve been fucked.”

Disgust was a social tool, used to mock, shame, and exclude. The Romans, unlike us, did not pretend everyone was beautiful. They knew that most people were ugly, smelly, and ridiculous. Reading Martial, I feel at home.

Here is the truth: reading about sex is, in its way, as pleasurable as sex itself. When I read Aristophanes joking about boys “sleeping with their legs in the air” (Clouds 1054–1070), I feel the same thrill I do when someone notices me in the corridor. The content excites, but the greater pleasure is narcissistic: the knowledge that I can read this in Greek, that I understand what it means, and that most people never will.

At school, I sit through PSHE classes where some bored supply teacher insists that “beauty is subjective” and that “respectful relationships” mean tolerating every form of ugliness. Then I go home and read:

ἐκεῖνοι δ’ ἐφύλαττον τοὺς μηροὺς ἀξύριστους, τὰς φωνὰς βαρείας, καὶ τὰ πάθη ἐν κόλποις. (Aristophanes, Frogs 1030–1035)

“That earlier generation kept their thighs unshaven, their voices deep, and their passions in check.”

The Athenians despised effeminacy. They despised excess. They believed beauty and restraint mattered. So do I. Reading about their sexual culture is not escapism. It is a reminder that ugliness is a choice—and that ugliness should be punished.

What this book does, above all, is show how dishonest our own culture has become. Today, sex is either commodified—sold in adverts, in TikTok dances—or moralised into oblivion. Everything must be about “consent,” “trauma,” “inclusivity.” The ancients were more honest. They admitted that some people were disgusting. They admitted that sex was hierarchical and cruel.

That honesty excites me more than any porn. Because it tells me I am not wrong. When I look around and see fat, spotty, greasy degenerates, I know that the ancients saw them too. Martial mocked them. Aristophanes laughed at them. Aeschines destroyed their political careers. Reading about it is pleasure—not only sexual, but intellectual, aesthetic, moral.

Sex and the Ancient City is not the last word on ancient sexuality. The editors admit that themselves. But it is a book that matters. It is explicit without being crude, erudite without being dull, and—for anyone like me—almost intoxicating.

I like sex. I like reading about sex. And I like knowing that the Greeks and Romans, for all their cruelty and madness, were honest enough to say what our own cowardly culture will not: that sex is not equal, that beauty matters, that disgust is real.

So yes: buy this book. Read it. Quote it. Enjoy it. And know that reading about Greek sneezes and Roman dildos is, for some of us, almost as good as sex itself.