This interdisciplinary volume analyses the importance of ancient Rome in the construction of post-classical Western homosexual identities.

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

Ten years after its original publication, Roman Homosexuality remains the definitive statement of this interesting but often misunderstood aspect of Roman culture. Learned yet accessible, the book has reached both students and general readers with an interest in ancient sexuality. This second edition features a new foreword by Martha Nussbaum, a completely rewritten introduction that takes account of new developments in the field, a rewritten and expanded appendix on ancient images of sexuality, and an updated bibliography.

‘A really fun idea for a book - and full of great stuff.’ Greg Jenner, Public Historian This is the perfect guide for any writer who wants to recreate the Roman world accurately in their fiction. It will aid any novelist, screenwriter, games designer or re-enactor in populating their story with authentic characters and scenes, costumes and locations. Written from a historian’s perspective, this guide pulls back the curtain to show the reader what life in Ancient Rome was really like: what they wore, what they ate, and how they spent their time at work, at home, at war, and at play. Individual chapters focus on different aspects of Romans’ lives, to give you specific knowledge of what they looked like and how they behaved, as well as a broad appreciation of what held their civilisation together, from religion, to the economy, to law and order. You may wish to work your way through the book from cover to cover, or focus specifically on individual chapters as you hone your creative writing skills. Covering the period between 200 BCE and 200 CE, A writer’s guide to Ancient Rome surveys the vast amount of sources and scholarship on the Classical world so you don’t have to! It outlines current scholarly debates and changing interpretations, suggests further reading, and recommends particular resources to mine for each topic. It gives you plenty to consider while you construct your own Roman world.

This book examines Gore Vidal’s lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing – sex, politics, and religion – this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal’s portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal’s other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967–2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal’s careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, reception studies, American politics and literature, and the work of Gore Vidal, this volume presents an original perspective on one of the most provocative writers and intellectuals in post-war American letters. It offers new insights into Vidal’s attitudes, influences, and beliefs, and throws fresh light upon his patrician self-fashioning and his mercurial output.

Introduction 1. Roman Traditions: Slaves, Prostitutes, and Wives 2. Greece and Rome 3. The Concept of Stuprum 4. Effeminacy and Masculinity 5. Sexual Roles and Identities Conclusions.

Expert biblical and practical advice for handling today's most challenging sexual issues Although modern culture constantly changes its views on sexuality, God's design for sexuality remains the same. Bringing together twenty-five expert contributors in relevant fields of study, Gary Barnes and Sandra Glahn address the most important and controversial areas of sexuality that Christians face today. From a scriptural perspective and with an irenic tone, the contributors address issues such as: • The theology of the human body • Male and female in the Genesis creation accounts • Abortion • Celibacy • Sexuality in marriage • Contraception • Infertility • Cohabitation • Divorce and remarriage • Same-sex attraction • Gender dysphoria An ideal handbook for pastors, counselors, instructors, and students, Sanctified Sexuality provides solid answers and prudent advice for the many questions Christians encounter on a daily basis.

"This is a book about submission and subversion, injustice and justice, heroes and villains." In Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? Jimmy Hoke reads Romans with an innovative, intersectional approach that produces distinctive meanings for passages that probe how queer wo/men who first encountered Paul's letter could have engaged with it. Though Paul's letter to the Romans arguably contains the Bible’s strongest condemnation of queer wo/men (1:26–27), that is not the letter's full story. Hoke turns a feminist and queer gaze toward Paul’s conception of faith and ethics, making explicit how Paul's theology throughout Romans has been affectively motivated by imperial notions of gender, race, and sexuality. Moving beyond Paul's singular voice, Hoke engages with a feminist and queer praxis of assemblage to generate plausible ways wo/men of Rome interacted with this epistle. By engaging affect theory, Hoke brings to life not only ideas and words but the feelings and sensations that moved in-between some of the earliest Christ-followers, revealing how queer wo/men were there among them and what that means for queer wo/men today. Hoke includes a reader's guide with key terms used throughout the book, making this an excellent option for both students and scholars beginning to engage not only Paul's letters but also the complex worlds of feminist, queer, and affect theories.

This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This volume investigates an important and surprisingly widespread phenomenon in Latin literature, which has to date received little sustained discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Though often associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature evinces a remarkably broad range of strategies designed to enable the adoption of a markedly disempowered voice- from topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in status-conforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia (artfully and strategically adopting a persona to garner favour, even when this means temporarily forfeiting one's higher status and discursive privileges), to the long-silenced female heroines of Ovid's Heroides and satire's irreverent take on the great and the good by framing its narratives as being articulated 'from below'. Even large-scale cultural self-positionings fall within this scope, be they expressions of Roman cultural inferiority vis-à-vis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between humble (yet spiritually superior) Christian writers and their grand, canonical, and classical (yet pagan) predecessors. The intersecting case studies offered in Complex Inferiorities examine this phenomenon in a wide range of genres, periods, and authors. By demonstrating that re-negotiating alleged weakness constitutes a central activity in Latin literature, this volume reveals the extent of the literary and cultural-political possibilities opened up by assuming and speaking in voices of weakness and inferiority. Authored by experts in their fields, the individual chapters explore the crucial role of the 'weaker voice' in establishing, perpetuating, and challenging hierarchies and values in a wide range of contexts- from poetics and choices of genre, to social status and intra- and intercultural relations- thereby offering invaluable insights not only for the study of classics, but for literary and cultural studies across the humanities.