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LONDON. — Historical accounts from the ancient world tend to reveal the cloistered nature of women’s lives.
In Greece, women were usually veiled in public, and in Rome, they had “guardians” (ordinarily their father or husband) to supervise their movements and handling of property.
Was the concept of the lusty woman pure male fantasy?
Or were women of the ancient world more interested in sex than is generally believed?
The vast majority of the surviving sources were written by men who were prone to exaggerate women’s sexual habits in one direction or the other.
Some went to such lengths to emphasise a woman’s virtue that they made her seem almost saintly and inhuman.
Others purposely presented women as sexually voracious as a means of blackening their characters.
If we took these descriptions at face value, we would come to the conclusion that women in the ancient world were either all chaste, or sex-mad.
Fortunately, it is possible to peer into the hearts of some classical women, who provide a far deeper view of female sexuality.
You only have to visit an ancient brothel, such as those of Pompeii, to see that sex was frequently on show.
The walls of the dismal, cell-like rooms in which sex workers plied their trade are covered in graffiti, much of it written by male clients, who liked to comment on the performances of named women.
A certain Greek poet, Elephantis, was allegedly so keen to give women sex tips that she wrote her own short books on the topic.
Where other women are quoted in other men’s writings, they tend to express themselves in terms of love as opposed to sex explicitly, which marks them out from some of their male contemporaries, including Martial and Catullus.
Lesbia, the pseudonymous lover of Catullus, tells him that “What a lady says to her lover in the moment, Ought to be written on the wind and running water”.
The phrase “pillow talk” comes to mind.
Sulpicia, one of the few Roman poetesses whose verses survive, describes her misery at being in the countryside away from her lover Cerinthus on her birthday — and then her relief that she can be in Rome after all.
These women did not need to describe sex with their beloved in crude detail to reveal what they really thought of it.
Men may dominate the sources but women, as Aphrodite well knew, could be every bit as passionate when the curtains were closed. — BBC.
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