Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (review)

In 1988, Eva Cantarella said that she had come to write about homosexual relations in Greece and Rome through her study of women's issues: the one could not be understood without the other. Marilyn Skinner's new book has much in common with Cantarella's Bisexuality in the Ancient World: it covers both Greek and Roman culture, and it is written for a general reader. Skinner, however, does something that no previous author has done. Rather than writing a book about one aspect or the other of ancient sexual customs, she has written a survey of the entire topic of sexuality in the classical world.

There has, of course, been a boom in scholarship on this topic over the last twenty-five years. Skinner responds to this trend in two ways. First, she does not, like earlier authors such as Dover, Foucault, or Cantarella, attempt to present a unified theory about her topic. Instead, she presents a survey of recent scholarship: the issues that are discussed and the main opinions about each. Second, her book is written not only for the general reader but for the student in the courses on gender and sexuality that are offered ever more frequently by American classics departments. She introduces these students to the topic of ancient sexuality by introducing them to current discussion of the topic (though with occasional interventions of her own).

On the whole, Skinner successfully accomplishes these goals. All the major voices in the field are represented, and she writes about their opinions in a clear and approachable, if sometimes hurried, way. She returns frequently to basic questions of comparison between ancient and modern cultures in a way that will be welcome to students (and useful to teachers). Her own occasional interventions in the debate, which occur largely in the Roman parts of the book (as on 252, where she argues against the existence of the cinaedus as an actual historical type), are models of the skepticism which every scholar hopes to inspire in his students.

I have, however, some reservations about using this book as a textbook. It is (again, like Cantarella's book) arranged chronologically, but, perhaps because it presents a survey more than a unified argument, its structure is hard to follow. There are, for instance, two chapters each on the Hellenistic period, Republican to Augustan Rome, and later Imperial Rome, but the reasons for the divisions inside each pair are not perspicuous. "Imperial Rome II," for instance, starts with a discussion of the tales (tall tales, as Skinner argues convincingly) of the emperors' sexual depravities and ends with a discussion of the Satyricon. It is not, however, entirely clear how this constitutes a chapter or why it is separate from the previous chapter. The chapters all lack clear theses or even summaries of the subjects to be covered; the conclusions tend to introduce new material rather than resuming each chapter's contents. Given, furthermore, the book's chronological organization, a brief historical introduction to each chapter would be useful for orienting students; a brief introduction to the sources to be discussed would be even more so.

Nonetheless, Skinner's book is certainly an important resource. Every classicist must, by now, be aware of some part of the area that she covers; few can be as aware as Skinner is of it all. Thus, this book will fill in gaps for almost everyone. It would prove particularly useful for anyone who is teaching a course on gender and sexuality and, if the teacher provides a certain amount of introductory material, could certainly play a valuable role in such a course.