Love and Relationships scholarship

Augustus and the Julian Laws

After his victory over Antony, Augustus doubled down on the reformation to Roman society (D’Ambra), even publicly expelling his own daughter from his household in 2BC after a scandal of promiscuity (Eck). In Wallace-Hadrill’s words, he was ‘leading Romans to recover the forgotten value, traditions and rites of the past’.

Wallace-Hadrill on Augustus’ objectives.

Augustus had a double challenge: to bring the population under control, and to turn the capital into an architecture showcase

Waterfield on desire in Plato

Desire had to be aroused, even if the young man mistakenly took it at first to be physical, because that same desire could enable him to transcend the physical and pursue wisdom and knowledge.

Waterfield on homoeroticism

Just because homoeroticism was acceptable within Athenian society is not to say that any given member of society accepted it.

Wilson on Sapphi+o

Sappho’s poems emphasise the isolation of the individual… she shows us what it means to be excluded and alone.

Sappho and the pain of love. (Karanika, Wilson, Stehle)

Sappho’s poetry, while beautiful, can also be interpreted as some of them most heartbreaking of the ancient world: Karanika comments of her communication of ‘female anxiety towards marriage’, while Wilson emphasises the bone-deep loneliness in her words, a women both destroyed and liberated by her own isolation and femininity. Perhaps this sorrow does not just come from a place of personal dissatisfaction, but speaks of Sappho’s position in broader Greek society. In Ancient Greece, the love of women, and love shared between woman, was a marginalised voice, and though this was to a degree silencing, it also provided her with a uniquely blank canvas, to redefine love according to her own rules and values, to be alone amongst her contemporaries, but to fill that void with her own impressions of beauty and an ideal of what love should be, In Stehle’s words, she ‘used the special conditions of lesbian love to create an alternative world in which mutual desire, rapture and separateness can be explored as female experience.’ (From this perspective, she arguably explores love and desire in much the same way as Plato, weaving together multiple threads of pain and beauty and love and convention to form a considered thesis of what love is, and what it should be.)

Aristotle on Sappho

Admire Sappho, even though she is a woman.

Goldhill and Hall on Female homoeroticism

While some, such as Goldhill, comment on the radicalism of Sappho’s unapologetic homoeroticism in a world where it had ‘no social status except that of a reviled and repressed perversion’, others, such as Hall are more dismissive, regarding it as ‘unremarkable’ within ancient society.

Annas on the role of women in Athenian society

Seldom have the sexes been so segregated in every aspect of life… Women were not even the primary sex objects for men. They had virtually no interaction with the social, political, of romantic lives of men.

Grube on homosexuality

Homosexual love alone was generally regarded as fulfilling the highest desires of men.

Bishop on the Ars Amatoria

It is about lust, rather than love

Hornblower on Ovid’s marriage

He was married three times before he was thirty.