Roman gay art

The deposit of this inquiry is the basis of our contemporary knowledge of ancient Greek homosexuality. The writer and scholar, however, emphasize the effectiveness of Rome’s legislative bodies and the possibility of enforcing legal norms. In the Roman military of the Republic period, any manifestations of homosexuality were severely exterminated.

The matter never came to court, but the loss of so much stock and future publications wrecked the company. These poems belong to a long and well-established tradition of male homoerotic poetry that goes back to the Greeks of the Archaic Age and was given new impetus centuries later in Roman literature. Sporus was a Roman boy who liked Emperor Nero because he reminded him of his late wife Poppaea Sabina.

Such behaviour is also mentioned in Plutarch in “The Parallel Lives” in the part devoted to Gaius Marius.

Lesbian love

Fresco from Pompeii showing lesbian love.

References to lesbian love in the literature of the Republic and Empire are extremely rare.

This book constituted “a compendium of individual artworks, placing them in the service of aesthetic, art-historical, and cultural observation and theorization.” (Simon Richter, “Johann Joachim Winckelmann,” in Haggerty) The central statue of History is the Laocoön which is described in highly erotic terms as the ideal of male beauty.

Perhaps the most important influence in the development of a homoerotic aesthetic within neoclassicism was the aesthetic philosophy of the German art historian, archaeologist, and head librarian of the Vatican, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). As a young teenager he sketched images of a more sexual nature, always homoerotic.

This is evidenced by the sources that mention a greater number of executions and corporal punishment imposed on free citizens of Rome.

Generally speaking, in civilian life homosexuality was rather rare and treated with disfavour (as evidenced by references in source texts, where things that were outrageous, characteristic and not often encountered were recorded), and such relations were tolerated, as I have mentioned, if a Roman citizen was the active party (otherwise, Roman blood was contaminated.

French neoclassicism is linked with combined political and moral considerations arising out of specific historical events – namely, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Emperor Vitellius always prepared an exclusive menu for his young lovers, aimed at stimulating the imagination and potency: wild boar liver, pheasant brain, flamingo tongues and dandelion moray.

The “Solonian” law presuming to protect pupils from such relationships, attested in Aeschines, was probably a late fifth-century development in reaction to their common occurrence in earlier generations. He grew up a fluent Italian speaker, since his parents hailed from Ticino where Swiss-Italian is the language, but schooled in Zürich he also learned German and French.

Wedding ceremonies reportedly included dowry and the wearing of a wedding veil. The animal data suggest that the seeds for pederasty were planted at the dawn of humanity.

Himeros Pindar's Tenth Olympian and Athlete-Trainer Pederasty

Thomas Hubbard PhD
Page Range: 137 - 171

The comparison of the adolescent boxer Hagesidamus and his trainer Ilas to Patroclus and Achilles in Pindar's Olympian 10.16-21 and the subsequent comparison of Hagesidamus to Ganymede in Olympian 10.99-105 suggest that the relationship was in some sense pederastic, particularly in the wake of Aeschylus' treatment of Achilles and Patroclus in these terms in Myrmidons.

Sappho's oeuvre is so fragmentary that the evidence it offers is tentative at best. Homoerotyzm w świecie starożytnym, Warszawa 2007

Foucault Michel, Historia seksualności, Warszawa 1995