My favorite books on sexual relationships in Greek & Roman antiquity

Who knew that the emperor Nero appointed an Advisor on Tastefulness, who also penned a bawdy and gritty novel about the adventures of several friends in the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD? Fairly few, and the even more surprising fact is that hundreds of pages of his text survive today. You can still read either in Latin or in English translation about two young men proposing to fight for the affections of the youth Giton and you can join them all in a visit to an archetypal Roman brothel. There is nothing else remaining that provides a more direct and authentic insight into daily experiences and relationships in ancient Rome.

The most perfect and poetic of Renault’s brilliant series of novels set in ancient Greece, which incorporates a captivating dramatization of the courting rituals surrounding the Athenian gymnasium that then leads into a lingering and lyrical love story. The whole saga is set against the historically accurate and stirring backdrop of the downfall of the Athenian Empire at the end of the 5th century BC.

This book is about the sublimation of an erotic relationship between a teenage boy and the emperor Hadrian that led to the creation of the last classical religious movement of Antiquity. The murky sacrificial drowning of Antinous in the River Nile prompted the emperor in his role as chief priest of Rome to deify the youth, setting up temples in his name and going so far as to define a celestial constellation in his image. Lambert’s posthumously published investigation rigorously rakes through the still glowing embers of this affair to define how it was ignited.

Davidson demonstrates that sexual relationships with courtesans and youths in ancient Athens paralleled the markets in other luxuries such as fish and wine rather more than resembling the modern ideal of romantic love. In a society where marriages were mainly business arrangements made between families to ensure the production of legitimate heirs to their estates, such formal relationships were frequently loveless. This led the male partners and those as yet unmarried to resort to employing mistresses, courtesans, and youths as luxurious distractions from the mundane matter of marital maintenance of the bloodline.

What would happen if a randy teenage boy became Emperor of Rome after winning a pitched battle against a usurper? Would the magisterial traditions and decorum of the office triumph over adolescent hormones or vice versa? Actually, there is no need to speculate about the answer, because it happened in real life and was recorded in several ancient histories that have come down to us. This novel, though billed upon its publication as erotic, is quite closely based on those histories. Clue: the hormonal impulses of teenage boys are quite hard to suppress.