Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome

<p>This groundbreaking study among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary philosophical and scientific documents.</p><p>Even today ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical ethereal Sapphic love or stereotyped as Amazons or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho Plato Ovid Juvenal and many other lyric poets satirists and astrological writers in search of the prevailing norms constraints and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply—a society before sexuality—where female homosexuality looks very different but is nonetheless very real.</p><p>Now available in English for the first time <i>Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome</i> includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.</p>