In Bed with the Ancient Greeks Paperback – 15 Jan. 2018

Very interesting book

A superb and detailed survey of sexuality amongst the ancient Greeks from Mycenae to the subjugation by the Romans. The extensive footnotes and bibliography only add to what is a well-written, well-researched scholarly but racy and readable, entertaining book. It makes an excellent companion to the author's earlier In Bed with the Romans which is just as good.

I read with great interets this book.It really goes into depth into the topic.Writing about a topic what interests us all but relating to a time far before our internet time is fascinating.Th author did a great job.And although I just started in the book I can recommend it if you want a thorough knowledge about the role of sex in Ancient Greece.

Bien

I'm not sure if the problems with this book are with the author or the editor. The work is pretty much exclusively a compilation of works from antiquity reporting the sexual practices in Ancient Greece, and thrown together in a fairly sloppy manner at that. For example, after having made ample reference to Athenaeus, he makes reference to the Deipnosophists, as though the reader is expected to know that he's referring to Athenaeus's work, Deiphnosophistae. Spelling is just all over the place - Heracles and Hercules are both used in the same sentence (!) where the one form appears 3 times and the other twice in one paragraph. Sometimes k is used, sometimes a Latinicized c. Sometimes the upsilon is rendered in standard fashion as y, sometimes as u. The glossary of sexual terms at the end has irregular font size and glaring errors (a superfluous lower case eta at the end of a word that was in all upper case letters prior to that, for example). Some sentences make no sense as they were clearly two separate thoughts never corrected: "Early evidence for Peyronie's disease has been found on an ancient Greek case has been discovered on a phallus votive limb, dedicated in a Minoan Peak Sanctuary [reviewer's note: this term is neither explained, nor is the reason for it to be capitalized remotely clear], dated at the end of the third millennium BC." Also, although the author is from the UK I believe that even there the spelling "ecstacy" is considered outmoded (to say nothing of actual spelling errors).There is no attempt at even remotely assessing the validity of statements, as stories heard second- (or third-) hand by notoriously unreliable authors such as Herodotus or Diodorus Siculus are just retold, often with terrible translation, at face value. A large portion of the book is dedicated to regurgitating the myths and legends of the gods and heroes. Perhaps I am wrong in assuming that most people who would consider a book like this are already familiar with such basics (in most cases, from an early age), but it was needless fluff. This statement is doubly true of the completely baffling digression on stories of the succession of Persian rulers, ostensibly because there was intrigue on the part of women (though even then, the connection to sex is very tenuous), because for extended stretches there was really nothing about relations between the sexes, love, sex, or anything else germane to the book. On that note, I would add that not only does the author veer into accounts of the Persians, but also of the Babylonians, Libyans, Egyptians and Romans. The Romans in particular are treated as identical with the Greeks for purposes of this book, something that makes me wish I not only did not buy this book, but also didn't buy the companion volume on Rome by the same author.I was expecting something that involved at least a bit of research and analysis rather than a simple regurgitation of ancient sources that are actually more entertaining. I was also hoping for a book that had passed some minimum review standards as to orthography, style and structure. I didn't get that.