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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. |
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Sappho |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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 Plato
(427-327 B.C.E) is preeminent among Greek writers on homosexual
themes as both a philosopher and a master of Greek prose. |
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Plutarch
(ca 46-ca 120) was a prolific author who wrote extensively on male-male
love in Greece and Rome. |
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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. |
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Theocritus
(ca 308-240 B.C.E.), an ancient Greek poet, is the first
great voice in the homoerotic
pastoral
tradition in Western literature. |
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 Virgil
(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. |
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Photo
Credits: Images of Plato and Virgil courtesy Northwestern
University Library Art Collection. |
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