A History of Erotica  

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==== The first whore dialogue ==== ==== The first whore dialogue ====
-[[User:Jahsonic/AHE/Greco-Roman/The first whore dialogue]]+ 
 +In Antiquity the tradition of the [[whore dialogue]] is born and in time it will become a genuine literary genre. The whore dialogue is a mixture of [[sex education]], [[medical folklore]] and erotic literature, and usually takes the form of an experienced older woman who reveals the mysteries of physical love to a younger girl. Since it is In Antiquity, there are no women writing in the field of eroticism. There are no [[women writer]]s, except for the Greek 7th century BC poet [[Sappho]]. So it are male authors who write the whore dialogues. They [[avail]] themselves of female personae, from [[temple harlot]]s to stale [[street walker]]s to nubile ingénues who wound up as orphans in a brothel to successful [[Madame]]s. Why was the whore so popular and would her voice sound with such clarity and frequency throughout the history of [[erotic literature]]? The answer is simple. Like no other she understands the [[male psyche]], having slept with so many of their kind. "All men began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes....Women have it. Men want it. What is it? The [[secret of life]]..." (footnote: the metaphor we use here is by American professor and author [[Camille Paglia]] from 1984.)
 + 
 +[[Lucian of Samosata]] (c. 120-180 AD.), a Greek-speaking author from ancient Rome, writes the oldest preserved whore dialogue, the so-called ''[[Dialogue of the Courtesans]]'' in the second century AD. Its most famous dialogue is that between the young Corinna and her mother Crobyle:
 + 
 +:"Well, Corinna, you see now that it wasn't so terrible to lose your virginity. You have spent your first night with a man. You have earned your first gift, no less than a hundred drachmas. With that I'll buy you a necklace."
 + 
 +What follows is lots of advice, about how she should dress from now on, how she ought to behave and that she should not attract young, but also older men. They may not be as attractive and virile, but they pay better. The view of women is obviously a very cynical one, but that is not to uncommon to the Greeks. There is an obvious misogynistic tradition in Greek literature. [[Hipponax]] writes in the sixth century BC on woman the following lines: "[[Two happy days a woman brings a man: the first, when he marries her; the second, when he bears her to the grave]]." The Romans are generally much more friendly towards the opposite sex.
 + 
==== The two "novels" of the Romans ==== ==== The two "novels" of the Romans ====
[[User:Jahsonic/AHE/Greco-Roman/The two "novels" of the Romans]] [[User:Jahsonic/AHE/Greco-Roman/The two "novels" of the Romans]]

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"Man reveals his true nature in his fears and desires. Show me what he is afraid of, show me what excites him, I will tell you who he is."--Sholem Stein

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This page The History of Erotica is a placeholder for a draft of an English translaton of De geschiedenis van de erotiek: van holbewoner tot Markies de Sade by Jan Willem Geerinck, published in 2011 in Dutch.

Contents

Table of contents

Introduction

Prehistory

Eros is the oldest of the gods, said Plato. He is the god of love, lust, blind passion and sexual reproduction. If Eros with his bow and arrow hits someone, the victim falls in love immediately. His parentage is significant: he is the son of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Ares, god of war. He is thus born out of beauty and belligerence, out of love and hate. Out of two opposites that are united nowhere else than in the most intimate space of the human psyche: the sexual act, and its abstraction: eroticism.

The prehistoric caveman, who we imagine to be hardly in command of language, communicating with jolting sounds rather than words, experienced this act just as sacredly and profanely as 21st-century man. Just as elusive, ineffable, unnameable and indescribable as today's mortal. Yet he tries to give expression to what he feels, to convert the immediacy of his experience into a tangible and visible image. The male desire and the heaving and pumping of his pelvis, apparently at random, without anyone having ever taught him. The woman receiving his pelvic blows and undulating under his strength, still unaware that her pregnancies are the result of their frenzy. Their mutual obsession with the other, the sense of wonder that transcends the animalistic but never entirely succeeds in escaping it. This powerful cocktail of confusing emotions provides the first erotic images and the first erotic art, from its beginnings two-fold, with a male and female version.

The cave painting Shaft of the Dead Man in the French Lascaux depicts male eroticism, and the Austrian Venus of Willendorf figurine depicts the female variant. Both date back to thousands of years before Christ, long before the Greeks and Romans. The painting in Lascaux and the Willendorf statue are the icons of prehistoric erotica. The dead man symbolizes male aggressive sexuality, as dictated by the hormone testosterone, the hormone at the root of the two basic male instincts, so aptly described by American New Age philosopher Ken Wilber as "fuck it, or kill it." The two instincts which the cave dweller needed to reproduce their kind.

The dead man shows a recumbent male figure with an erect penis, drawn as a straight line, as a toddler would. Towering above him is a wounded bison whose intestines protrude from its body, next to the bison is a broken spear. Has the man conquered the bison before the fight became his fatal end? Is it the depiction of a dream vision? Impossible to answer that question, but the violent struggle of the man and his obvious sexual arousal are juxtaposed here in one image, and are both symbols of male eroticism. His excitement - which once put on fire, is sometimes extinguished after a few minutes - has far-reaching consequences for her. Her breasts become fuller, her mound swells, her belly gets bigger and her buttocks heavier, her nesting instinct requires protection. She is the pregnant woman, the Venus of Willendorf, the idealization of femininity, the incarnate womb, the embodied protector of the species. The mother goddess. The hunter of Lascaux and the mother of Willendorf are the archetypes of erotic art. They symbolize the irrationality of love, which despite of its apparent incompatibility of the aggressive male and protective female eroticism, results in its most brilliant moments in a miraculous and divine harmony between Venus and Eros, the protagonists in the history of erotica.

Greco-Roman

In contrast to our caveman, our Greco-Roman ancestor understands agriculture and literally reaps its fruits. The elite of this new civilization can read and write, paint and sculpt. One who masters the written word can compose a love letter, but just as well write erotic poetry, a novel or a book about sex education. And thus love becomes an art, practised by both gods and mortals.

Thanks to these skills, which produce cultural artefacts, our understanding of Greco-Roman love life is much more precise than that of prehistoric man. The Greeks are popularly known for the love of older men for young boys, called pederasty and for homosexuality, the love of men for men, in general. In fact, the term Greek love has became a byword for homosexuality, used well into the previous century. That kind of loving is also found in Roman society, but there the attitude towards homosexuals and pederasts is rather less positive, a Roman man had to be cautious not to be on the receiving end of this kind of love. From the Romans we especially remember their general debauchery, and the perversions of the decadent Roman emperors, handed down throughout history with famous examples the exploits of ruler Caligula and empress Messalina.

Supposedly, Greeks and Romans knew very little sexual shame. To prove this point the large number of utensils that are decorated in an erotic or sexual manner, like the grotesque penis-shaped oil lamps, are usually brought to the fore. Yet shame could not have been an unknown phenomenon in Greco-Roman times. It is noteworthy that the Greek and Roman terms for the genitalia, aidoion and pudendum, mean 'shame' in their literal translation. The corresponding goddesses Aidos and Pudicitia are deifications of modesty, chastity and shame. If the Greeks and Romans embellished their surroundings with -- to our eyes -- obscene objects, the truth is that these objects are not a sign of their general debauchery. The penis as ornamental element has a symbolic value. It stands for fertility and fertility is essential for our ancestor. Fertility for the crops he grows and fertility for his family, because that shall assure him of a carefree retirement. Sexually suggestive objects for everyday use are not about sex but about happiness. Just as a four-leaf clover in a locket around someone's neck or a horseshoe above the door. These do not betray one's interest in botany or equestrianism, they are simply signs trying to enforce luck. Thus for the Romans, the penis is simply is a sign of good fortune, a means to ward off the evil eye. Whoever is offended by this phallic object is sorely mistaken.

Coitus interruptus

For the first time in history - and this fact cannot be stressed enough - man can have sex with a significantly reduced risk of pregnancy. He's mastered the mystery of reproduction and recognized the male role in it. The most popular method of contraception was coitus interruptus, first described in the Jewish Bible with the story of Onan, who preferred to shoot his seed onto the rocks instead of trusting it to the vagina of his wife, simply because he does not wish to beget children with her. The name Onan gives us later the term "onanism" which will both stand for "masturbation" and "premature withdrawal". Other kinds of of birth control methods can be found, similar to today's, including abortion. Love had become a game, a playful pastime that did not necessarily needed to have far reaching consequences. The first sexual revolution is a fact.

A study in ideal form

‘I'd rather die than use obscene and improper words; but when you, Priapus, as a god, appear with your testicles hanging out, it is appropriate for me to speak of cunts and cocks.’ Priapeia 28
For some years we know that in antiquity it was the custom to paint sculptures in bright colours, which would undoubtedly have added to the lustre of this work.

The playfulness of the sexual act is accompanied by an aesthetization of the human body, a body that no longer serves merely for the biological role it was allotted. A body which can now be displayed for purely aesthetic reasons.

Eroticism became a study in ideal form. Examples are the pictures of the Parisienne of Knossos, the Venus Anadyomene, the Venus Kallipygos and the Barberini Faun. All four show near perfect people with ideal physiques and beautiful faces. The Parisienne is almost a real contemporary Parisian woman, including red painted lips, a slender neck and large eyes. Beauty is so important to the Greeks that when the famous courtesan Phryne during a trial where her life is at stake, suddenly stripped before the judges of the Areopagus, she was promptly acquitted. The judges could not believe that a woman with such perfect forms might be capable of wrongdoing. Her physical beauty cannot be anything else but a sign of God, the old judges agree.

Thanks to her beauty, Venus is privy to various favours. Venus the beautiful. In the arts it is enough to drop her name to make clear that she is a female nude. That nudity can take two forms: heavenly or earthly. Or to put it in the words of Plato: "Venus caelestis" and "Venus vulgaris." The first lives in the heavenly firmament and the second among the people. That dichotomy between the two Venuses will keep popping up in the depiction of the female nude. The heavenly Venus is respected, she's a beauty ideal, the unattainable goddess and she is thought of in flattering terms such as "artistic nude" and "erotic". The popular Venus is the object of pitying glances. She is the girl next door, available, rather than nude she is simply 'naked' and the word accompanying the pointing finger will more likely be 'pornographic'.

Venus came fully grown, nude and perfect in the world. She rises from the waves of the sea as the most beautiful of all women. Conceived and born when the genitals of the sky god castrated Uranus hit the silver foam of the sea after a long fall. Venus is white as the foam from which she was born, and amiable and lovely as a flower. When she comes ashore the grass shoots under her feet as she strides past. She was painted first in a lost work by Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity. It is the beginning of a long tradition. The version of Pompeii is a copy of that work. On that mural she is shown lying in a scallop seashell and that is not by coincidence, the shell is a vulva symbol. Although the anonymous painter has has tried his hardest, I'm sure to depict her at her comeliest, he was only partly successful. Especially her legs are poorly rendered. They seem snapped like matchsticks. Her gaze is absent and directed towards the sky. The Venus Kallipygos is more sensual. It is a life-size marble statue of a woman who lifts up her dress and offers us a glimpse of her backside. It comes as no surprise that 'Venus Kallipygos' literally means Venus with the beautiful buttocks. " She glances over her shoulder: does she want to inspect her own buttocks? Or does she show her derrière, stealthily trying to tempt to us? In the second case we are reduced to voyeurs. Arousing such feelings is the prerogative of the Venus vulgaris.

What is the male sex symbol during this era? He is a faun, the marble Barberini Faun. This statue shows a very shapely young man leaning back, legs spread, so that his penis is clearly visible, his face squeezed into a contorted drunken ecstasy, as if he is offering himself to an imaginary partner. Has the drunkenness fuelled his desire? Will he still be capable to perform the deed of deeds? We do not know, but it may be that the sculptor asked himself that very question when he made the sculpture of this fleshly Adonis.


The caveman is alive and well

Although our Greco-Roman ancestor is concerned with beauty ideals, his world view is still close to that of the caveman: his world view is of a religious, superstitious and eroto-magic nature.

There are several archaeological finds from the Greco-Roman times, that even by today's standards could be called downright obscene. Objects such as Baubo [1] - an elderly woman shamelessly showing her vulva - seemingly display an unabashed erotic audacity. But it is a feminine sensuality meant to symbolize fertility, not eroticism. The chimes [image][2] in the shape of a flying penis does the same for male fertility, just as the the Satyr and the Goat [3] and the giant phallus of the fertility god Priapus on a mural in Pompeii [image][4].

The chimes consist of a hanging phallus upon which three other phalluses and two wings are mounted. From the shaft of the penis three bells dangle, which when stirred by the wind chime harmoniously. It served as a symbol of fertility and votive object, they were called 'fascina' (plural of 'fascinum'), where our word "fascination" is derived from.

I know of no bigger penis in a realist painting than the erection in the life-size mural of Priapus in Pompeii [image]. In a bizarre detail, this horny fertility deity holds a pair of scales in his right hand, with which he weighs his erection against a bag full of coins. His phallus clearly outweigh the coins. Money can buy anything but a big penis is even worth more, would seem the allegorical interpretation of this tableau. Our word "priapism," the medical term for a painful, persistent and non-sexual erection, reminds us of this well-hung deity.

The Satyr and the Goat is an anonymous sculpture of the god Pan, a satyr in Greek mythology, a faun in Roman mythology. He is the god of the forest, the patron saint of shepherds and their flocks and the god of animal instinct. He has the lower body and the horns of a goat - an animal that is still known for its sexual appetite - but a human torso, a long narrow face, a big nose and yellow eyes. He will later appear in Christian demonology, where the devil often sports horns and walks on hooves rather than feet. Pan has left traces in modern English. If he shows himself screaming in the woods, the nymphs run away and people panic. Fauns are -- in the polytheism of the Romans and the Greeks -- the horniest of gods, they known of no taboo, rape hordes of virgins and animals alike and generally lack any sense of shame. Next to sculpture, the majority of archaeological finds among the Greeks is pottery. An almost completely preserved plate upon which is depicted an orgy (Kylix with Erotic Scenes[5]) is in the collections of the Louvre. Whether it is currently on display, I do not know. If you are visiting, just ask for it.

If the Priapus from Pompeii is the personification of the penis and virility, than Artemis of Ephesus [6] is the personification of the breast and the female ability to feed. In visualizations such as these, the mythological sexual characteristics are inflated to gigantic proportions in order to highlight their power and effectiveness. Quality loses out against size and quantity. Artemis of Ephesus is portrayed with three rows of breasts, although some modern scholars nowadays interpret them as deified testicles of a bull. The most famous version is a first century copy of a Roman original and is located in Izmir, Turkey.

Ovid and the loves of the Gods

In our monotheistic concept of God, God created man in his image and likeness, but in the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans the people created the gods in their likeness. Nothing human is alien to the gods and no one has described the gods better than Ovid (43 BC. - 17 AD). He made his début at the age of eighteen with his Amores, but had previously made a name for himself as a love poet.

He is wealthy and can devote himself entirely to poetry. His collection Amores are followed by the Ars Amatoria (The art of love) and his best-known work, The Metamorphoses. He can afford a luxurious and dissolute life in the cosmopolitan metropolis Rome and is a bona fide society figure. The poet marries three times, and is survided by his last wife.

Despite his success, and for reasons which remain unclear, he is exiled at the age of 51 by Emperor Augustus to the distant shores of the Black Sea. It is possible that the emperor considered the poet too light-hearted but others believe that a conspiracy theory was the reason for his exile. Although political subversion and sexual freedom often go hand in hand it is generally supposed that his exile was for political reasons rather than censorship. As an exile in a remote corner of the Roman world, languishing amidst what he called "the barbarians", the frivolous Ovid city man leads a desolate and lonely existence. Even his wife had remained in Rome. Without ever being rehabilitated, he dies in exile at the age of 60. His self-written epitaph reads:

I that lie here, the bard of playful love,
The poet Ovid, perished for my play.
Oh passing lover, scorn not thou to pray
That no ill chance my restful bones may move.
Tristia tr. via Ovid and his influence Edward Kennard Rand

Fortunately, his oeuvre almost entirely survived. Two works are particularly relevant to our research. The Metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria. The Metamorphoses tells of the love adventures of the gods and the Ars amatoria is the first book of sex education. Neither uses explicit language, which in any case cannot be found in the work of Ovid, no direct references to mentula nor cunnus, the Latin terms for cock and cunt.

In the Metamorphoses, the gods are not depicted as exalted beings . Ovid describes them in a playful manner as ordinary mortals, with typical human foibles and amorous whims. The epic poem describes the creation and history of the world according to Greco-Roman mythology. Gods, demigods and mortals are constantly undergoing dramatic transformations (metamorphoses) and shifted into plants, flowers, trees, rocks, clouds, rivers and animals. Their bizarre behaviour is easily explained; many of them are indeed plagued by the arrows of Eros. Bewitched by love, they are not their ordinary selves.

Some of the more sexual stories are that in which the nymph Daphne is changed into a laurel tree to escape an impending rape by Apollo. Or the story of the hunter Actaeon who is turned into a deer after he had spied on the naked goddess Diana. As a deer he is torn to pieces by his own hounds. Serves him right.

Narcissus and Hermaphroditus

Narcissus and Hermaphroditus are well-known even today, they both live on in contemporary psychology and sexology. Hermaphroditus is a handsome deity worshipped by Salmacis, a nymph so in love with him that she first tries to rape him and when that fails desperately prays to the gods that they would be united forever. Her prayer is answered and they are fused in one body. If in one individual both male and female reproductive organs are found, the term hermaphroditism is used.

Narcissus is an equally a handsome young man who lives for the hunt. He has a made lots of hearts skip a beat with his exceptional beauty, but wants nothing of love and he rejects suitor haughtily and cruelly, a fate that would also befall the lovesick nymph Echo. One day his wanderings bring him to a sacred pond of crystal clear water. When he bends over, he sees his reflection in the water, but he thinks it is a beautiful water spirit that lives in the pond. He instantly falls in love with his own reflection and cannot bring himself to separate from this beautiful apparition which disappears whenever he tries to touch it. Thus he slowly withers away altogether. To him we owe the term narcissism, coined by Freud to denote a excessive self-love.

Zeus the proto-Don Juan

But the main character of the Metamorphoses, the Don Juan of the entire pantheon is Zeus / Jupiter himself, the king of the gods. He is married to his sister, the goddess Hera, the eldest daughter of Kronos. To her great sadness and anger Zeus can not resist other women. Hera was very jealous and tries in many ways to keep him from his amorous escapades. All too often in vain: we know of at least seventeen relationships with goddesses and twenty-six with mortal women. He fathered dozens of children with them.

His most famous conquests are those of Danae, Io, Leda, Callisto, Antiope, and Europe. Whenever he sets out to conquer a woman, he changes shape to increase his chances of success and to escape the watchful eye of his jealous wife. Depending on the woman he sets out to seduce, he has to be either sweet and gentle or tough and frightening, and accordingly changes his appearance. That this is efficient, is well-known to contemporary man.

With Danae he changes himself into a golden rain, and while she is caught in a tower, he lands comfortably between her legs through the bars of her prison. With Io he shifts into a cloud, with Leda to swan, with Callisto he passes for for the goddess Artemis, with Antiope he pretends to be a and with Europa he takes the shape of a white bull.

Zeus is a seducer, a conqueror, but you might just as well say that he abducts women, or kidnaps or rapes them. The multiplicity of meanings is caused by the Latin term raptio, which may mean any of the aforementioned. But that same ambiguity is also symptomatic of the nature of male-female love and the battle of the sexes described in the Metamorphoses. This theme of forced seduction is celebrated today in the 724 romance novels of Barbara Cartland, in which women chant "No, no, no", but inwardly cheer "Yes, yes, yes".

Zeus's last conquest is the one of Leda, the wife of a Spartan king. When he cannot convince her to give herself to him immediately, Zeus turns into a swan and overwhelms her. Ashamed of what has happened, Leda has intercourse with her husband the same evening, and after nine months she gives birth to four children, coming from one egg. Castor and Helen were the children of Zeus, Polydeukes and Clytemnestra of her husband. It is no coincidence that Ovid chose for a swan in this story, it's the only bird (along with ducks and geese) that has a penis. With a little imagination, the slender neck of a swan can even be taken for a penis symbol.

When gods lust after animals

Greco-Roman mythology includes a number of stories that speak of sexual love of man towards his different-footed counterpart. Sexual contact between humans and animals is an undisputed reality in present and past times. Rarely is it the object of beautiful art, except in the images of the hybrids that arise from such contact.

We have noted how Zeus turned himself into a swan in order to overwhelm Leda. There is also the story of Pasiphaë, the wife of King Minos of Crete. Her husband has insulted the god Poseidon, upon which the God punishes the couple by instilling in Pasiphaë a inordinate sexual desire for a beautiful white bull. Pasiphaë's lust is of such a magnitude that she just had to consume her love with the mighty beast, so strong is her lust. She asks the leading inventor Daedalus to build her a wooden cow, in which she hides and assumes the proper position in order to be mounted by the bull.

The transgressive nature of this story has prevented its depiction -- at least sufficiently explicit to be called erotic and to merit inclusion in this book -- in the arts for over centuries. A print[7] that does not exactly leave little to the imagination but hints at the carnality of the scene, is by 17th-century publisher and artist Johann Ulrich Krauss. He insinuates the heart of the matter by showing Pasiphaë just before she takes her place in the wooden cow, in which back to back, belly to belly and groin to groin her wish will be fulfilled moments later. Only in Ovid's inexhaustible imagination could this communion lead to offspring some months later, when the famous Minotaur was born, a human figure with the head of a bull.

How to pick-up women?

Ovid takes ample pleasure in telling of the love affairs of the gods, but he also wants to give love advice to us plain mortals in his Ars Amatoria, an early sex manual. Ars amatoria (The art of love) is a poem in three books in which Ovid -- in his usual breezy style -- raises topics that people find so hard to put into words. He has Venus say, "... what you blush to tell is the most important part of the whole matter". Each volume ends with a bed scene. Ovid writes remarkable passages about simultaneous orgasm and his dislike of gay love. More than anything else the poems are a guide to the courtship of women and remarkably up-to-date - except perhaps in those passages on the use of love potions: 

   Remember that every woman can be conquered.
   Work on your character and develop your intellect.
   Take care of your hair.
   Be on good terms with her maid.
   Avoid harsh words.
   Choose beautiful but not too expensive clothes.
   Choose the right time.
   Be patient and be obliging.
   Be careful with make-up.
   Write her a letter full of flattery and promises.
   Win the sympathy of her staff.
   Groom yourself in private.
   Learn to be eloquent and persevere.
   Send small but precious gifts.
   Camouflage your imperfections.
   Stay as near to her as possible.
   Read her a love poem.
   Laugh and cry in a distinguished manner.
   Make the most of your appearance, but do not act effeminate.
   Let her take credit.
   Walk elegantly.
   Drink wine with moderation.
   Appeal to her vanity.
   Uncover an arm and or a bit of shoulder.
   Be friendly with her lover.
   Be her loving care.
   Learn to sing and make music.
   Make abundant oaths and promises.
   Do not go a away for a long time.
   Know thy literature.
   Praise and kiss her.
   Do not get caught in adultery.
   Practice your dance and play.
   Use gentle violence with her.
   Do not drink love potions.
   Do not participate in sports, but stroll in the city.
   Take the initiative, but be prepared to step back.
   Confess infidelity for a passionate reconciliation.
   Mingle.
   Make sure you look pale and thin.
   Know yourself.
   Beware of imposters.
   Beware of friends and relatives.
   Endure setbacks.
   Instil hope and fear by taking a short delay in answering a love letter.
   Adjust yourself to her.
   Do not be jealous rivals.
   Take care of your correspondence.
   Exercise discretion in love.
   Do not get angry.
   Gloss over her shortcomings. 
   Do not be haughty.
   Enjoy a mature woman.
   Make eye contact and smile.
   Prolong love making and strive for a simultaneous orgasm.
   Look happy, not sad.

Fututa sum hic: I got laid here

Next to Ovid we find a whole series of writings that deal with "the beast with two backs" as the act of love is sometimes colourfully called. These writings range from obscene graffiti on the walls of Rome to the satirical poems of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and Propertius, from the bedroom farces of Plautus and Terence to the picaresque novels Satyricon and The Golden Ass, from the Priapea (odes to the penis) and gossip to the whore dialogues of Lucian. In Greece the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander find favour with the public and there is the curious case of the Milesian tale.

A foretaste, Catullus, Carmen 16:

I'll fuck you up your ass and down your throat,
you cock-sucker Aurelius and fudge-packed Furius!
Just because my verses are tender doesn't mean
that I've gone all soft. Sure, a poet should focus
on writing poetry and not on sex; but does that
mean they can't write about sex? If a poem is
in good taste, well-written and sexy,
it can tingle and stiffen even hairy old men,
not just horny teenagers. You think I'm a wuss
because I write about thousands of kisses?
I'll fuck you up your ass and down your throat! --tr. Wikipedia

When man invented writing, he immediately used it for the loftiest as well as the basest purposes. The obscene graffiti, that can be found abundantly on the walls of Ancient Rome, falls in the latter category. If, as the early 20th century Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues, the degree of civilization of a country can be measured by the extent to which its toilets are smeared with obscene graffiti, Ancient Rome was not exactly the most civilized place on earth. Thus we read on the walls of Pompeii "fututa sum hic (I got laid here) and the walls of the gladiator academy carry inscriptions such as "Celadus makes the girls sigh." But that it does not always have to be of such a prosaic nature is proven by an inconsolable soul who leaves the following on a Roman wall:

Now lovers come. For I am bound
To crush Dame Venus' frame.
With cudgel stout and right arm sound,
A smacking blow I'll aim
If she can break my tender heart.
Why, Lovers, tell me pray,
With cudgel cannot I make smart The goddess' head today ?

--[...]tr. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight from Essays on Ancient Fiction

In praise of love

From the obscene graffiti on the walls of ancient Rome it is but a small step to the sometimes very cynical poems of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and Propertius. Satirist Juvenal, who lived between approximately 60 and 135 AD is known as a misogynist. In his infamous Sixth Satire - also known as Against Women- he writes about the character flaws of the opposite sex: they are adulterous, nymphomaniac, pretentious, quarrelsome, rude, superstitious and know no restraint. Above all the sixth satire is a pamphlet against marriage. The poet advises men not to marry: "You might as well commit suicide or sleep with a boy." That same love-hate relationship to women is also evident in the amusing and often obscene epigrams of Martial (40 - 103? AD).

That the more lyrical Catullus (84-54 BC.), who thanks his Carmina Catulli is known as the Roman love poet, is sometimes challenged in his love encounters with women can be seen in the following lines of poetry, perhaps his most famous ones:

"I hate and love. Why so I cannot tell
I feel it and endure the pains of hell"

(From: Carmen 85 - translation James Cranstoun)

Although Catullus, just like Martial and Juvenal, sometimes deals with the bitter aftermath of a love relationship, his poems are more amorous:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love.
As for all the rumors of those stern old men,
Let us value them at a mere penny.
Suns may set and yet rise again, but
Us, with our brief light, can set but once.
The night which falls is one never-ending sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.
Then, another thousand, and a second hundred.
Then, yet another thousand, and a hundred.
Then, when we have counted up many thousands,
Let us shake the abacus, so that no one may know the number,
And become jealous when they see
How many kisses we have shared.

--(Carmen 5 - WP translation)

But despite the occasional setbacks that the quest for love may engender, they all go for it (ervoor gaan), and Propertius (47-15 BC.) writes in his Elegies, "The humbler I behave in love, the more I have of her to expect." The 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson paraphrases the poet when he says: "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

The spectacle of love

For both the Greeks and the Romans, theatre is the main source of fiction, film has of course not yet been invented, and the first real novels remain to be written. It goes without saying that tragedy is not only diversion the ancients have a liking for, laughter was high on their wish-list. A large number of improper plays meets that demand.

The forerunner of Roman comedy writers was the Greek scribe Menander (342-291 BC), writer of comedies with evocative titles as The Grouch, Double Deceiver, The Hero, The Flatterer, Drugged Women, Drunkenness, The Man She Hated and The Possessed Girl, titles that would not look out of place on the cover of contemporary airport novels. Love and all its complications are about the only topic in these plays.

A century later, the Roman writer Plautus (250-184 BC) introduces the typical cardboard characters from classic comedy, stereotypical characters like the dirty old men and women of loose morals. In short, in this type of theatre, all women are whores and all men are stupid. Plautus transposes a lot of Greek comedies, including those of Menander, to a Roman setting, and does so in a scintillating Latin. The farces of Terence (c. 195-159 BC.) also hark back to indecent Greek comedies, but they are less frivolous and with greater psychological depth than in those of Plautus. He is best-known today for saying "homo sum, et nihil humanum a me alienum puto" (I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me).

Theatre in Greece originates as a feast in honor of the god Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), the god of wine and fertility, of ecstasy and the good life. The main companions of Dionysos satyrs and nymphs, the two archetypes of lust. A theatrical genre is even named after this lusty God, the satyr play. It was the custom that after three tragedies, one satyr play performed, consisting of mainly of jocular entertainment with a horny, elated, lazy and drunken character. One must imagine actors with huge strap-on dildos storming the stage like madmen, dispersing the seductive and screaming nymphs.

Proto-feminism and the first sex strike

The coarse humour I just described is amply surpassed by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes (446-386 BC) in his play Lysistrata, which has a witty, smart and significant sexual plot. Lysistrata concerns a company of Athenian ladies who use a sex strike to force their men to lay down their arms. Under the leadership of the militant Lysistrata - a name which means "she who disbands armies" - these women occupy the treasury of the Acropolis to financially drain the war. They do not yield until peace finally exists among the Greek city-states.

"Let us wait at home with our faces made up and then advance to greet our husbands with nothing on but our little tunics. . . then, when they are panting with desire, if we slip away instead of yielding, they'll soon conclude an armistice, I can tell you ... So no more legs in the air."

But, retorts a woman "if our husbands drag us by main force into the bedchamber?" Then you should "hold on to the door posts" answers Lysistrata. And when another woman asks "and if they beat us?" In that case, advises Lysistrata "yield to their wishes, but with a bad grace; there is no pleasure for them, when they do it by force." "Because," Lysistrata concludes "there's no satisfaction for a man, unless the woman shares it." Which is a surprisingly modern advice, remembering that the play was written about 2,500 years ago.1

Ode to the penis

But sex strike or not, the penis would not be held down so easily. He is only too eagerly praised in 95 of most obscene epigrams that ever saw the light of day, the so-called Priapeia. The author and the origin of these poems are quite unclear, but we do know that they are fully dedicated to the stiff fertility god Priapus, and his principal tool the phallus. This collection was not translated until the second half of the 19th century.

Though I be wooden Priapus (as thou see'st),
With wooden sickle and a prickle of wood,
Yet will I seize thee, girl! and hold thee seized
And This, however gross, withouten fraud
Stiffer than lyre-string or than twisted rope
I'll thrust and bury to thy seventh rib.
--Priapeia 5

Gossip and tall tales

There's lots of gossip in the Roman Empire. There are many things to gossip about: there are the exploits of the mad emperors Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus and Elagabalus, whose adultery, debauchery, malignancies and perversities herald the end of the empire. But it are primarily the women Cleopatra and Messalina who make tongues wag. Cleopatra supposedly fucked her way to the top via the beds of many an influential man.

And of Messalina it is said that she is so horny and insatiable that she rents a room in a brothel where under the pseudonym Lycisca she gives herself to complete strangers. Juvenal describes in his sixth satire how Messalina challenges the well-know Roman prostitute Scylla to engage in a veritable sex competition. Whoever pleasures the highest number of men within a certain time, is the winner. After 24 hours Scylla gives up, making Messalina the undisputed winner with a score of 25 men. Then she is "tired but not satiated, still burning with the rigid tensions of her vulva". An average of one man per hour is not a bad score. The current record -- established in 2004 and still standing at the time of writing this book -- stands at 919 men in one day. Pliny the Elder (ca. 23-79 AD) may have had the nymphomaniac Messalina in mind when he raises the issue of the collapse of 'modern morality' in his Naturalis Historia, complaining that "the human race has invented every possible form of perverted sexual pleasure and crimes against nature, while women have invented abortion. How much more guilty are we in this respect than animals?" Based on this statement Pliny may be proclaimed the first moral crusader. We will find his type more frequently in the following pages of this book.

The first whore dialogue

In Antiquity the tradition of the whore dialogue is born and in time it will become a genuine literary genre. The whore dialogue is a mixture of sex education, medical folklore and erotic literature, and usually takes the form of an experienced older woman who reveals the mysteries of physical love to a younger girl. Since it is In Antiquity, there are no women writing in the field of eroticism. There are no women writers, except for the Greek 7th century BC poet Sappho. So it are male authors who write the whore dialogues. They avail themselves of female personae, from temple harlots to stale street walkers to nubile ingénues who wound up as orphans in a brothel to successful Madames. Why was the whore so popular and would her voice sound with such clarity and frequency throughout the history of erotic literature? The answer is simple. Like no other she understands the male psyche, having slept with so many of their kind. "All men began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes....Women have it. Men want it. What is it? The secret of life..." (footnote: the metaphor we use here is by American professor and author Camille Paglia from 1984.)

Lucian of Samosata (c. 120-180 AD.), a Greek-speaking author from ancient Rome, writes the oldest preserved whore dialogue, the so-called Dialogue of the Courtesans in the second century AD. Its most famous dialogue is that between the young Corinna and her mother Crobyle:

"Well, Corinna, you see now that it wasn't so terrible to lose your virginity. You have spent your first night with a man. You have earned your first gift, no less than a hundred drachmas. With that I'll buy you a necklace."

What follows is lots of advice, about how she should dress from now on, how she ought to behave and that she should not attract young, but also older men. They may not be as attractive and virile, but they pay better. The view of women is obviously a very cynical one, but that is not to uncommon to the Greeks. There is an obvious misogynistic tradition in Greek literature. Hipponax writes in the sixth century BC on woman the following lines: "Two happy days a woman brings a man: the first, when he marries her; the second, when he bears her to the grave." The Romans are generally much more friendly towards the opposite sex.

The two "novels" of the Romans

User:Jahsonic/AHE/Greco-Roman/The two "novels" of the Romans

The East

The Middle Ages

Renaissance

France

The love that dare not speak its name

The Low Countries

Baroquerotica

The 18th century: Eros Enlightened

Verantwoording

Bibliografie

See also


This page A History of Erotica, is © Jan-Willem Geerinck and may only be cited as per the fair use doctrine.
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