This Companion covers a range of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality. It explores ancient representations of these concepts as we define them today, as well as recent perspectives that have been projected back onto antiquity.
Beginning in antiquity, the chapters examine how the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded concepts of what we would today call "gender" and "sexuality" based on the evidence available to us, and chart the varied interpretations and receptions of these concepts across time to the present day. In exploring how different cultures have "received" the classical past, the volume investigates these cultures’ different interpretations of Greek and Roman sexualities, and what these interpretations can reveal about their own attitudes. Through the contributions in this book, the reader gains a deeper understanding of this essential part of human existence, derived from influential sources. From ancient to modern and postmodern perspectives, from cinematic productions to TikTok videos, receptions of ancient gender and sexuality abound.
This volume is of interest to students and scholars of ancient history, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ancient societies, as well as those working on popular culture and gender studies more broadly.
Author(s): K.R. Moore
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 634
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Legacies of the Ancient Greeks
1 “Never Bury My Bones Apart From Yours”: Iliad Reception in Xena: Warrior Princess
2 Achilles and Patroclus Revisited (Again)
3 #Patrochilles: Find the Phallus
4 Of Late I Dream of Lesbos: Renée Vivien’s Queer Utopias in the Aeolian Mode
5 A ‘Hollywood-Bowl Tiresias’: Antiquity and Trans- Identity in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and Myron
6 Panic in the Oikos: Female Bodies, [re]Productive Anxiety and Wasted Landscapes in Greek Myth and Dystopian SF
7 “Je Sentis Tout Mon Corps et Transir et Brûler”: Sublimating Ancient Sexuality in Jean Racine’s Phèdre et Hippolyte
8 On the Reception of Same-Sex Marriage in Classical Greece and Beyond
9 Ancient and Modern Receptions of Eunuchs With a Focus on Alexander’s Bagoas
10 The Sexuality of the Argeads
11 Alexander the Great and Hephaistion in Fiction After Stonewall
12 Patterns of Force: Receptions of Agesilaus II, Disability, and Greek Sexuality
13 A Revised Interpretation of the Ancient Greek Hetaira
14 Those Infamous Females: The (Ancient) Reception of the Sexuality of Hellenistic Queens
15 Dover, Foucault and the Rules of South African Mine Marriages
Part II Romanocentric Receptions
16 Two Case Studies on Receptions of Sex and Power: Lucretia and Verginia
17 Seduction Skills of Queen Cleopatra and Definitions of Masculinity in the Roman Literature
18 Women’s Virgil: Reception as Re-imagination
19 The Poet, the Puella, and the Penis: Impotence and Elegiac Failure in Maximianus and Ovid
20 Boudica as a Literary Figure in Cassius Dio
21 The Influence of Roman Laws on Same-Sex Acts on Twenty-First-Century Homophobia in Africa
22 Roman Gender in the Roman de Silence
Part III Greek and Roman Afterlives
23 Perfumes for Men, Perfumes for Women: The Uses of Scents and the Prejudice of Corruption in the Graeco-Roman World
24 “Thirteen Days Were Devoted to Serving Her Passion”: Amazon Queen Thalestris as a Sexual Male Fantasy in Roman Historiography and Medieval Epic
25 The Reception of Classical Masculinity in Women’s Historical Novels
26 The Sexuality of the “Tyrant” in Greek and Latin Literature and in The Walking Dead
27 Graeco-Roman Worship of the Beloved: The Ancient and Modern Cults of Antinous
28 Transgender Saints: Perpetua’s Legacy
29 A Prehistory of Intersex, or: The Lives and Afterlives of the “Hermaphrodite”
30 Female Agency in Greek Tragedy and Its Receptions in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
Index
