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Customer Reviews of Love In the Ancient World

Human Sexuality in the Ancient World
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.

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The author fails to deliver.
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.

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No Book For Children, Definitely One for Adults
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.