Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome

This volume offers a selection of important and accessible scholarship on sex and gender in Greece and Rome, organized to provide an historical overview.

The book reflects the pace of research and thought since the 1960s and illustrates the range of approaches now available.For centuries, discussions of gender in the ancient world, if they took place at all, focused on how the roles and spheres of the sexes were divided.

While men occupied the public sphere of the community, ranged through the Greek and Roman worlds and participated in politics, courts, theatre and sport, women kept to the home.

Sex occupied a separate sphere, in scholarly terms restricted to specialists in ancient medicine. And then the subjects were transformed, first by Sir Kenneth Dover, then, following in his footsteps, by Michel Foucault, the former apparently a dry Oxford don, the latter, as it seemed, a flamboyant homosexual.Penetration was then seen as the main means of defining gender.

Men penetrated; women were penetrated. As a result, not all males were men; subordinate groups - boys, slaves - could forego or lose their gender status.

Men who wanted to penetrate too many women or boys, or who desired to do so too much, might lose status, subject to the power of their own passions as much as were their partners.

The public and the private were found to be knit together in a web of power.

This marriage of sex and gender was then championed and challenged.

The separation of spheres was called into question on other grounds; transgressive categories (eunuchs, cross-dressers, gods) took their turn at centre-stage.

But men could no longer be accepted as the background against which others stood out and now appear to wear masks and play roles like any actors.This book charts and illustrates the extraordinary evolution of scholarly investigation on a once hidden aspect of the ancient world, and provides a stimulating introduction for students and teachers alike.

In doing so it sheds light on intriguing aspects of both ancient practice and contemporary thought.