Sleep of Reason : Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome
Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics. The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love
Conference papers and proceedings
1 online resource (468 pages)
9780226923314, 0226923312
1045074035
Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality; 2. Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma; 3. Erotic Experience in the Conjugal Bed: Good Wives in Greek Tragedy; 4. Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness; 5. The Legend of the Sacred Band; 6. Plato, Zeno, and the Object of Love; 7. Aristotle on Sex and Love; 8. Two Women of Samos; 9. The First Homosexuality?; 10. Marriage and Sexuality in Republican Rome: A Roman Conjugal Love Story. 11. The Incomplete Feminism of Musonius Rufus, Platonist, Stoic, and Roman12. Eros and Aphrodisia in the Works of Dio Chrysostom; 13. Enacting Eros; 14. The Erotic Experience of Looking: Cultural Conflict and the Gaze in Empire Culture; 15. Agents and Victims: Constructions of Gender and Desire in Ancient Greek Love Magic; Appendix: Major Historical Figures Discussed; Contributors; Indexes