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Special Features Index  

 
Spotlight Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome
 
Ancient Greek literature openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose. For the most part, Roman writing on homosexual themes followed the Greek models, though the two cultures held sharply differing attitudes toward love between males.
 
 
 
Sappho
Sappho
 
 
 
  Augustine of Hippo's (334-430) hostility toward all non-procreative sexuality led him to condemn homosexuality, though same-sex friendships played an important role in his own personal and emotional life.  
 
 
  Roman poet Catullus (ca 85-ca 55 B.C.E) incorporated homoerotic themes in his verse that both reflected the passionate character of same-sex friendships and described several of his own homosexual adventures.  
 
 
  Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) reflects the easy bisexuality of the first century B.C.E. Roman upper class in his accomplished and influential poetry.  
 
 
  Lucian (ca 120-ca 185) is best known as a satirical author of seventy to eighty prose pieces in Greek. Some treat homo-
sexuality as a personal trait associated with villainy, pretension, and ignorance.
 
 
 
  The Greco-Roman myths concerning same-sex love have been of crucial importance to the Western gay and lesbian literary heritage, both as texts and as icons.  
 
 
  Both the elegiac and the romantic pastoral have been associated with homoerotic desire from their beginnings in classical literature to their echoes in contemporary literatures.  
 
 
  Petronius' (ca 27-66) Satyricon, a brilliant satire of excesses in Nero's Rome, remains one of the most bumptious homoerotic picaresque narratives ever written.  
 
 
  PlatoPlato (427-327 B.C.E) is preeminent among Greek writers on homosexual themes as both a philosopher and a master of Greek prose.  
 
 
  Plutarch (ca 46-ca 120) was a prolific author who wrote extensively on male-male love in Greece and Rome.  
 
 
  Sappho (ca 630 B.C.E.) has been admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets of ancient Greece and is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.  
 
 
  Theocritus (ca 308-240 B.C.E.), an ancient Greek poet,  is the first great voice in the homoerotic pastoral tradition in Western literature.  
 
 
  VirgilVirgil (70-19 B.C.E.) wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.  
 
 
  Photo Credits:  Images of Plato and Virgil courtesy Northwestern University Library Art Collection.  
 
 

 
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