Blanshard Alastair. Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2010. — xv+219 p. — ISBN: 978-1-4051-2291-7 (hbk.: alk. paper)This book is a story about fantasy and the reality that lurks behind these fantasies. It is a history of facts and factoids. Its subject matter is the erotic desires that have been projected onto the cultures of classical antiquity. This work examines the impact that sexual fantasies about the classical world have had on western culture. Authors, artists, politicians, philosophers, and moralists have all turned to the classical world in a search to understand erotic desire. The classical world has regularly been invoked both as the home of sexual freedom and a haven for unnatural perversity. This monograph aims to examine the ways in which cultures have used classical erotica to locate and articulate their own erotic discourse. It attempts to unearth the various investments that cultures and individuals have made in antique sexual pleasure. It examines the ways in which the classical world has provided a mask for the dissimulation of acts of power as regulations of pleasure.