This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

This chapter presents an overview of, and insight into, the sexual lives of the inhabitants of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It examines both public attitudes and private behaviours by focusing on three key areas: marriage, prostitution, and male same-sex relationships. The discussion of marriage looks at the traditional ages at which men and girls traditionally wed, how marital partners were chosen, and the emotional and sexual life of married couples, as well as divorce, widow(er)hood, and remarriage. The section on prostitution considers the wide variety of sex workers operating in classical Athens, the conditions in which they worked, and the status they enjoyed. The discussion takes in streetwalkers and brothel workers whose services could be bought cheaply (pornai), trained musicians and dancers who provided entertainment at all-male drinking parties, and high-fee hetairai renowned for their looks, wit, and intelligence. The last section examines the practice of pederasty, a traditionally elite pursuit which saw adult men form relationships with pubescent boys. This discussion covers courtship and its power dynamics, the age of participants, and the ways in which pederasty is depicted in art, as well as shifting public attitudes towards pederasty throughout the classical era.

This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the place of desire and disembodiment in queer musical experience. Taking as its focus the writings of John Addington Symonds, this chapter examines the representation of the voice of the chorister in late Victorian literature. The fetishization of the chorister in pederastic texts by Symonds and John Gambril Nicholson forms part of a broader eroticization of childhood innocence in Victorian culture. An examination of Victorian vocal treatises shows how such vocal innocence is figured as arising from the renunciation of the body. In this respect, Symonds’s desire for the singing voice can be understood in the light of psychoanalytic models in which the voice is understood as a Lacanian ‘lost object’. The pederastic listening practices engaged in by Symonds and his contemporaries invite a reassessment of the frequent idealization in queer studies of the singing voice as a space in which sexual desire may be freely and unproblematically explored. The discussion draws upon recent work in queer studies calling for closer engagement with those shameful and embarrassing aspects of queer history that many in the queer community today might prefer to forget.

Drawing on textual and material evidence, this chapter sketches the topography of different kinds of sex within the built environment of classical Athens. It also examines the role that the social and political structures of the city played in the sex lives of its citizens.