Bisexuality in the Ancient World
Eva Cantarella, 1988
Secondo natura
286 pages
Read in 2025.06
check synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Intro and review summary 🔽
✔ Ancient Rome and Greece
✔ Their separate history and culture around bisexuality
✔ Arrival of Christianity and its moral
★★★★★ A man marries woman as a social obligation, a man has a relationship with a younger man for education in Greece, and for his manliness in Rome - and the societies get tired. Fascinating to see we've always suffered from the same things, patriarchy and machismo.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
I've had this for long, but didn't really realise it was so academic, written by a university professor in Milan.
Bisexuality here is not the same definition as today, as in, loving men and women at the same level.
It means that men are socially obliged to marry women, but also to love men, for different reasons in Greece and Rome.
In Greece it was about education and sophistication, and only men could educate boys via semen.
Rome was about machismo, men conquer at wars and in life they conquer women and other men.
In the end both cultures were extremely misogynistic.
It's all about how men should be higher than women.
In Rome, then came the religion (made by men of course, then it spread to Greece) misogynistic as ever, but this time to protect men's superiority they told people to focus on reproduction, just marry and have sex with women who will give more births.
She argues that, however it was not Christianity that changed this attitude of loving men, men were already a bit tired of being forced to be macho constantly, times change, people change, so it was more that Christianity came at the right time.
The book expects you to know the basics of the ancient world which I don't so I now need further readings, especially Sappho.
But even after 1000s of years, we're still suffering from the same problems - patriarchy and machismo.
🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽
●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
Bisexuality in the Ancient World
●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●
Bisexuality in the Ancient World 2e: Second Edition (Nota Bene)
●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
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