Customer Reviews

Love In The Ancient World

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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.

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.

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.

I was looking for some Roman eye candy art-books & this one caught my eye. Lots of pretty photos of Greek, Eqyptian, Etruscan and Roman sculpture, painting and architecture. Some amusing stories, history and conjecture about the sexuality of classical cultures. This is a subject which takes up a suprising amount of space on the bookshelves of the classical section of my local bookstore.

This book features photos of a lot of the surviving "off color" sculpture, mosaic and painting from ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian culture. If you're offended by that sort of thing, don't buy the book. It's not really a book about "love" in the spiritual sense; more or less, just in the physical sense. Nor is it much of a highbrow treatment of the subject of ancient sexuality. Mostly, it is a collection of anecdotes. The prose is pleasant enough; John Julius Norwich is a great writer, but if you're interested in learning about what the ancients were doing with their naughty parts, you're better off with another book.

Most of what you know about Roman sexuality (it's a sex book more than a love book) is probably wrong. This book isn't real good at correcting people's perceptions of the ancients as a bunch of moral degenerates, but, well, it isn't catering to that sort of crowd. This is mostly a picture book. Perfect material for seducing young classics scholars, or for bringing to a modern toga party, but essentially unserious as a work of history. What do you expect from a picture book?

The back cover of "Love in the Ancient World" states that the author will tell the reader, "What is love? And how did people deal with it from humanity's earliest days? How was it represented, communicated . . . ? The answer to such questions would be interesting.
Unfortunately, the author confuses sex and love and tells us stories of Nero's slaughter of his wife, mistress, etc. There is pottery that shows Greeks engaged in gay activities. Do these things say anything about love? No. There is a difference between love and sex which the author fails to distinguish. He actually confuses the two throughout the book. The photographs are wonderful and I learned something by looking at them. The text, however, leaves way too much to be desired.
(PS I am not some crazy conservative.)
Do not spend your hard earned dollars on this book.