The study of women in antiquity is a well-established area of research in the classics. In The Erotics of Domination, Ellen Greene reexamines long-held scholarly attitudes concerning the representation of male sexual desire and female subjection in the Latin love poetry of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Examining first-person poetic personae that have often been romanticized by critics, Greene finds that male sexuality is consistently threatened as moral resolve and social status are undermined by desires that render men passively "womanish": powerless and emotional.
"Whereas the Catullan lover appears to struggle against his own 'feminization,' the Roman elegiac poets -- particularly Propertius and Ovid -- proclaim in their poems a radically unconventional philosophy of life through their apparently deliberate inversion of conventional sex roles -- in which women are portrayed as dominant and men as subservient. Roman elegiac poetry is predicated entirely on clearly defined roles for the speaker and his mistress. That servitude, at least nominally, accords the lover's mistress complete domination and control over him." -- from the introduction
