Abstract

Until recently, I held several informed assumptions about sexuality in the ancient world: that without exception the ancient Greeks and Romans did not define categories of sexual activity by the sex of the object of desire ; that female homoerotic activity occupied roughly the same space of social value in ancient Greece as in ancient Rome; that in so far as it could be discerned, female homoerotic activity was depicted in Greece and Rome according to the male pederastic model; that no significant discourse existed about a form of female homoeroticism that was outside of the asymmetric norm defined by such a model; that in keeping with the male pederastic model, women who were sexually attracted to other women were figured as gender deviants, and particularly as being masculine; and that such women were regularly figured as having monstrously large clitorises which were thought—fantastically—to mimic an erect phallus. Thanks to Sandra Boehringer’s incisive study, I now believe every one of these assumptions to be wrong.