1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality
This Companion covers a range of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality. It explores ancient representations of these concepts as we define them today, as well as recent perspectives that have been projected back onto antiquity.
Beginning in antiquity, the chapters examine how the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded concepts of what we would today call "gender" and "sexuality" based on the evidence available to us, and chart the varied interpretations and receptions of these concepts across time to the present day. In exploring how different cultures have "received" the classical past, the volume investigates these cultures’ different interpretations of Greek and Roman sexualities, and what these interpretations can reveal about their own attitudes. Through the contributions in this book, the reader gains a deeper understanding of this essential part of human existence, derived from influential sources. From ancient to modern and postmodern perspectives, from cinematic productions to TikTok videos, receptions of ancient gender and sexuality abound.
This volume is of interest to students and scholars of ancient history, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ancient societies, as well as those working on popular culture and gender studies more broadly.
Introduction, 1. "Never bury my bones apart from yours": Iliad Reception in Xena: Warrior Princess - Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld, 2. Achilles and Patroclus Revisited (Again) - David Delbar, 3. #Patrochilles: Find the Phallus - Bruce M. King and Lynn Kozak, 4. Of Late I Dream of Lesbos: Renée Vivien’s Queer Utopias in the Aeolian Mode - J.L. Watson, 5. A ‘Hollywood-Bowl Tiresias’: Antiquity and Trans- Identity in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and Myron - Quentin Broughall, 6. Panic in the oikos: female bodies, [re]productive anxiety and wasted landscapes in Greek myth and dystopian SF. Thinking about nature through gender in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Blade Runner and The Handmaid's Tale - Larissa Tittl, 7. "Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler": Sublimating Ancient Sexuality in Jean Racine’s Phèdre et Hippolyte - Mary Hamil Gilbert, 8. On the Reception of Same-Sex Marriage in Classical Greece and Beyond - K.R. Moore, 9. Ancient & Modern Receptions of Eunuchs with a Focus on Alexander’s Bagoas - Andrew Michael Chugg, 10. The Sexuality of the Argeads - Sabine Müller, 11. Alexander the Great and Hephaistion in Fiction after Stonewall - Jeanne Reames, 12. Patterns of Force: Receptions of Agesilaus II, Disability, and Greek Sexuality - Alexandra F. Morris, 13. A Revised Interpretation of the Ancient Greek Hetaira - Stephanie Budin, 14. Those infamous females: The (Ancient) Reception of the Sexuality of Hellenistic Queens - Alex McAuley & Ana Garcia Espinosa, 15. Dover, Foucault and the Rules of South African Mine Marriages - Susan L. Haskins, 16. Two Case Studies on Receptions of Sex & Power: Lucretia and Verginia - Paul Chrystal, 17. Seduction Skills of Queen Cleopatra and Definitions of Masculinity in the Roman Literature - Jaakkojuhani Peltonen, 18. Women’s Virgil: Reception as Re-imagination - Charlie Kerrigan, 19. The Poet, the Puella, and the Penis: Impotence and Elegiac Failure in Maximianus and Ovid - Grace Funsten, 20. Boudica as a Literary Figure in Cassius Dio - Heiko Kammers, 21. The influence of Roman Laws Regarding Same-Sex acts on Homophobia in Africa - Susan Haskins, 22. Roman Gender in the Roman de Silence - Sasha Kelly, 23. Perfumes for Men, Perfumes for Women: the Uses of Scents and the Prejudice of Corruption in the Graeco-Roman World - Giuseppe Squillace, 24. "Thirteen days were devoted to serving her passion": Amazon Queen Thalestris as a Sexual Male Fantasy in Roman Historiography and Medieval Epic - Jaakkojuhani Peltonen, 25. The Reception of Classical Masculinity in Women’s Historical Novels - Leanne Bibby, 26. The Sexuality of the "Tyrant" in Greek and Latin Literature and in the Walking Dead - Sabine Müller, 27. Graeco-Roman Worship of the Beloved: The Ancient and Modern Cults of Antinous - Andrew Michael Chugg, 28. Transgender Saints: Perpetua’s Legacy - Barbara Gold, 29. A Prehistory of Intersex, or: The lives and Afterlives of the ‘Hermaphrodite’ - Chris Mowat, 30. Female Agency in Greek Tragedy and its Receptions in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries - Lorna Hardwick.
Biography
Dr. K.R. Moore, PhD (St-A) is currently a senior lecturer in the history of ideas at Teesside University, UK; his publications include "The Iphis Incident: Ovid’s Accidental Discovery of Gender Dysphoria" and Sex and the Second-Best City: Sex and Society in the Laws of Plato (Routledge 2005).
