love and relationships scholarly views

Greek (Sappho & Plato) Roman (Seneca & Ovid)

Annas - Greece - Athenian Women

Athenian women in Plato’s day led suppressed and powerless lives

Freeman - Greece - less tolerance

there was less tolerance for same-s£x relations between women.

Waterfield - Greece - upper-class phenomenon

homoeroticism was more of an upper-class phenomenon.

Karanika - Sappho - marriage

Communicates the female anxiety towards marriage.

Hall - Sappho - unremarkable

Sappho’s homoerotic stance, in the ancient setting, was unremarkable

Schoenbaechler - Sappho - confused

a confused young girl

Brown - Plato - abolition of the family

Plato believed that the abolition of family would improve the cohesion of society.

Waterfield - Plato - about sex stopping us from ascending to the forms

This is the love that enslaves us

Dover - Plato - Greek moral tradition

In praising the ability to resist temptation to bodily pleasure, Plato was fully in accord with Greek moral tradition.

Motto - Seneca - Social union

Seneca stresses that man was born for social union which is engendered by love and kindness

Gloyn - Seneca - neither good nor bad

Love in and of itself is neither good nor bad: its how you use it that matters.

Gloyn - Seneca - stoics defined love as

the stoics defined love as a wish to create a friendship with one another based on the person’s moral and physical attractiveness - so not inherently heterosexual, or indeed sexual at all.

Kreitner - Seneca - antithesis

the stoics held that sexual intercourse was the very antithesis of reason.