Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy

by Daniel Orrells

Sex is fundamental to society. We cannot think about politics, power, identity or culture without also thinking about sexuality. Despite this, the scientific study of sexual behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Doctors, legal experts and other intellectuals have all pondered challenging questions in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest sexual research. How might we separate talking about sex scientifically from discussing and consuming pornography? How do we speak objectively about desire and pleasure? And how do the words that we use to talk about sex affect what we are able to say about it? Such questions increasingly inform public discourse across a variety of media. Showing how ancient words and ideas have left a significant imprint on present-day ideas about sex, Daniel Orrells offers a bold new narrative of how the scientific study of sexuality came into being. Uncovering the intriguing story of how the obscene and erotic verse of Roman epigram and love poetry became the sanitised language of nineteenth-century sexual science, this divertingly readable book demonstrates how the reception of both Latin and Greek texts was central to the development of modern sexology and psychoanalysis. Ranging from Sappho, Catullus and Martial to Michel Foucault, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the author reveals just how profoundly classics has shaped the landscape of sexual identity that we inhabit today.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2013

Reviews

[Trinity Benstock · Rating 3 out of 5]

The driving premise of this book being that of a connection between the early science of sex in the 19th century and a long inheritance of reading into ancient texts starting with the renaissance. Orrell proves this by examining how several authors from the Renaissance to Freud examined, appropriated, and interpreted classical representations of the deed. The section on the influence of archaeological discoveries on the burgeoning Altertumswissenschaft in the late 18th century was especially well done. However, I found the whole book just okay, if occasionally interesting and well argued.

[Julia Deptuła]

*disso*