Love In The Ancient World [Paperback]

Christopher Miles (Author), John Norwich (Author), John Julius Norwich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2000

Travel back in time in search of long-lost attitudes on love and lust, passion and desire. Beautifully illustrated in full color, this fascinating exploration looks at how ancient civilizations regarded sex and sexuality before hedonism was curtailed by organized religion and relations between the sexes were complicated by a prevailing sense of guilt. Exquisite photographs showcase sculpture, pottery, paintings, and architecture that feature graphic representations of the human form and the art of love. By seeing how love was represented, communicated, commemorated, mythologized, and incorporated into worship from the earliest cave dwellers to the sophisticated Egyptian, Greek, and Roman societies, we can gain new perspectives on history as well as on our lives today. 176 pages (all in color), 9 x 11.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and, after a spell of National Service in the Navy, at New College, Oxford, where he took a degree in French and Russian. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Service, where he remained for twelve years, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and with the British Delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva. In 1964 he resigned from the service in order to write.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Sterling (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841880108
• ISBN-13: 978-1841880105
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,793,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty, but..., June 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Love in the Ancient World (Hardcover)

The book's strength is its beautiful, abundant illustrations; its weakness is the text. Reading through the book is not nearly as enjoyable as simply looking at the pictures: Some of the illustrations are not discussed in the text, and the text often refers to works of art not pictured in the book.

Another weakness of the text is its frequently dumbed-down tone and the shallow treatment given many of the subjects in its survey. The text and picture captions are also riddled with typographical and grammatical errors.

Despite the flaws in the text, however, the photographs of classical art are lovely, and the book is certainly worth browsing through.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Human Sexuality in the Ancient World, February 24, 2004

By 

Doreen Mace "cafecupp" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love In The Ancient World (Paperback)

Some people criticize the title, "Love in the Ancient World" as misleading, but this book covers human sexuality from the Venus figurines of prehistoric art to the Ancient Greek distinction between physical and spiritual love. The authors examine various pieces of art and interpret the values of people in the ancient world. There is a little story where D. H. Lawrence visited a wall in 1927 which his guide commented the work as "un po' di ponografico" or a little ponographic. Lawrence is intrigued by the artwork and wonders about its meaning of this fresco painting called "The Tomb of the Bulls" that depicts two men in an erotic position with a bull charging at them. One has to ask whether the message is about what happens to those who engage in baser sexual acts, as a warning against sex without love. There are also included many mythological stories that are interesting because of the amount of depth that is covered in them. This book is definitely geared towards mature adults and adds much to intellectual discussion of how society defines love.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Book For Children, Definitely One for Adults, December 18, 2000

By 

Holy Olio "holy_olio" (Grand Rapids, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love In The Ancient World (Paperback)

This is a large format (coffee-table) book with lots of excellent pictures and a readable but erudite text. "Olisboi" is the ancient Greek word for dildo (p 84), and to my eye it looks suspiciously like "lesbian", suggesting an altogether different origin for the latter word, perhaps a pun.

Among the excellent pix in this book is a mosaic from a Roman villa in Corinth. It portrays the face of Dionysus, but the pattern around his central portrait is best described as psychedelic (p 58). So, there really is nothing new under the Sun - this is the first century equivalent of a black light poster of op-art. Followers of Dionysus liked to warm up with unmingled wine and allegedly some mildly stimulating herbs. This cult goes back, apparently, to the heyday of Catal Huyuk, as there are representations of Dionysus-like and related characters. Catal Huyuk and its short-lived successor ceased to be 7500 years ago.

Magdelanian art comes from the last Ice Age. It's the same culture discussed as the source of the Atlantis legend by Mary Settegast in her excellent "Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology" which has a chapter about Catal Huyuk and is out in a Jan 2000 edition.

Among the Magdelanian art shown in Love in the Ancient World are phalli carved from mammoth ivory up to 19,000 years ago, and a vulva carved on a cavern wall up to 32,000 years ago. I figure that people by and large were not living in caves and carving naughty bits on the wall, but rather that the same kinds of people who pursue artistic fields today were off by themselves. Most of the cave art found in books concerns animals and supposed hunting magic rituals, so it's probably a public service that Miles and Norwich have included these surpressed works.

See also "Eros In Pompeii" by Michael Grant with photography by Antonia Mulas and "A Book of Love from the Ancient Mediterranean: The Sweetness of Honey and the Sting of Bees" by Michelle Lovric and Nikiforos Doxiadis Mardas.