Libertines, “immorals”, pleasure-seekers. Or moralists, supercilious, severe. The truth is that we know little about the relationship between the ancients – our Greek and Roman ancestors – and sex, and it is also heavily tainted by prejudices and stereotypes: either Dido or Phryne, or Sappho or Plautus. The recluse and icy matrons (I don’t do it for my own pleasure…) or nymphomaniacs, Lucrezia or Messalina. The powerless women who have the power to stop the war with… the sex strike conceived by Lysistrata. “Pedagogical” pederasty and the cult of the phallus and “active” virility. The brothels of the Suburra and the virgin priestesses. The explosive excesses of comedy and the tirades of philosophers. There is an ancient world that we believe we know through hints, clichés, legends and mythological figures (often emphasized and further typified by cinema), yet we are often indebted to it for persistent attitudes and archetypes whose origins we ignore. Very useful, and very entertaining, for broadening our gaze is Carocci’s beautiful series Sfere extra, which publishes a series of anthologies on «The Greeks, the Romans and…»: magic, war, love, the sea, animals. To these was added the precious contribution of a Sicilian professor (Syracusan by birth and Messina by adoption), Professor Anna Maria Urso, full professor of Classical Philology at the University of Messina, as well as collaborator of these pages: «The Greeks, the Romans and… sex».
Human, too human
A small but complete anthology of the most varied texts, from poetry to medicine to philosophy, expertly chosen, organized and introduced, which illuminate different aspects of the imagination of the ancients regarding this universally human experience but powerfully subject to the most varied taboos, exclusions, beliefs and obsessions. In fruitful dialogue with the previous, very successful, work by Professor Urso, «Body» (Inschibboleth, 2023): catalog of bodies, divine or human too human, described by medicine, sung by poetry, celebrated or censored, embellished and manipulated or neglected and condemned.
This time it is a cultured but light investigation, a broad reconnaissance in very different areas: in the nine chapters (and a specific talent of the author is that of titling sections and individual fragments with a great taste for provocation and contamination, evocatively evoking works and figures of contemporary and even pop culture: from «Raging Bull» to «Fatal Attraction», from «Scenes from a Wedding» to «When Harry Met Sally») a rigorous path is drawn from the mythical imagery, Eros as vital and generative force that permeates the cosmos, to the “seduction manuals”, through the desiring body of the gods, the fifty shades of prostitution, homosexuality between refined “Greek love” and execrated passivity, the ancestors of “sex toys”, love “out of the norm” – one of the chapters in which it is most interesting to realize the cultural gap starting from the construction that each society makes of its own prejudices and taboos and “delimits the spaces of the normal and the anomalous” – and sex as an object (never “scientific” enough, however) of medicine.
A light and ironic figure but also the ability to decisively cross paths with themes that are neither ironic nor light: the relationship between genders, in patriarchal worlds dominated by suffocating misogyny and tyrannical authoritarianism towards women, and violence, whether sanctioned by law or inherent in the profound dissymmetry of relationships between genders and between social classes. And sex, which is not only a biological drive and function but (like everything else) essentially a cultural construction, reflects all this in ancient texts: the fragment of the “Theodosian Code” which recommends, in cases of rape, punishing the victim, because after all “she asked for it”, reminds us, with the severe evidence of the historical evidence, of the origin and persistence of ferocious conditioning that we still suffer today.
Contiguous to these aspects is the discussion of ancient medicine (of which the author is an internationally recognized expert), where the foundations are laid for the codification of “a physiological inferiority of women on which her legal, economic and cultural submission is built”: and this starting precisely from sex, which is ultimately the most mysterious, carnal but ethereal activity, which calls into question, for the ancients (and not only for them), far too many worlds that cannot be explored and cannot even be clearly observed.
The imperfect male
So we can smile – and the author often makes us smile, thanks to her writing skills – at the theory of the “female seed” (obviously “watered down” and second choice: the woman is perceived, and defined, as an “imperfect male”, as a “plan B”) or at the systems for discovering if a woman is pure (I’ll just tell you that it takes some lentils…), but without ever forgetting the etymology of distortions and injustices that are still painfully current.
The book will be presented tomorrow afternoon (6 pm) at the Feltrinelli Point in Messina: Prof. will talk to the author. Giuseppe Giordano, professor of History of Philosophy and vice-rector of the University of Messina. Readings by the young student of the Academy of the National Institute of Ancient Drama of Syracuse Michela Nicastro.