In Clio's bedroom by James Davidson

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

Sex in history, history in sex

Historians are now posing questions that once they were too shy to ask, but – suggests classicist Dr James Davidson – they may be missing the jokes

It would be fair to say that, after the sexual revolution of the Sixties, sex became something of a hot topic among historians.

Sorting through the underwear
Clio, the muse of history, woke up to find scholars wandering through her private apartments, breaking down her bedroom door, sorting through her underwear drawer, pulling back the bedclothes and taking a magnifying glass to her sheets, and bombarding her with impertinent questions that historians of a previous generation had been too shy to ask.

Suddenly scholars of ancient history were queuing up to ask librarians for the keys to their secret cabinets of indecent books, and importuning museums for access to their more private holdings. Those 'dirty bits' in ancient documents that Victorian editors had left in Latin or simply left out were reinserted and translated into English. It was no longer necessary to have had an Oxbridge education to learn what the Roman emperor Tiberius (reigned AD 14-37) got up to on the island of Capri, or what exactly it was that Catullus threatened to do to 'Furius' and 'Aurelius' in the last decades BC.

Now cherubic Eros, the winged Cupid of Greek mythology, was revealed to be no innocent child, no god of affectionate words and holding hands, but something rather more adult: the god of sexual desire. From his vantage-point in Piccadilly Circus, Eros sported a definite leer.

Off the shelf
The sexual revolution in ancient studies was really a case of sharing with the general public knowledge that the experts had previously kept to themselves. The colourful sexual lives of men and women in relatively recent times came as more of a surprise.

Secret sexual diaries were decoded in England. Scandalous court cases were unearthed in the archives of quiet provincial towns in France. In Italy, police records were taken off the shelf and thoroughly re-examined with a more worldly eye.

The biography of the long-forgotten 19th-century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin was brought to public attention by French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1979 and published in paperback the following year. Seventeenth-century lesbian nuns were 'outed' in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the medieval historian John Boswell claimed to have discovered that same-sex marriages had been performed in Christian churches right through the Middle Ages. And a scholarly edition was prepared of the 18th-century pornography that had been so energetically covered up by the censors of the last kings of France.

Shedding inhibitions
Biographers – who had formerly felt compelled to draw a veil over the sexual side of their subjects' lives – now felt compelled to spice things up, producing new editions with more sex, whether or not the evidence was there to sustain their speculations. And when it was a question of an author's sexuality, scholars of literature quickly shed any inhibitions about the relevance of an artist's life to their work.

Caravaggio, Oscar Wilde and Christopher Marlowe had been so indiscreet that, frankly, they got no more than they deserved. But soon attention turned to some neglected metaphors and odd phrasing in the works of other writers: queer performativity in Chaucer, Jane Austen's horror of masturbation revealed through a careful reading of Sense and Sensibility, Henry James's preoccupation with holes and clefts and chasms.

Sperm-rites
Pre-history was not immune from this sexual revolution. Greek historians merrily attempted to trace Greek homosexuality back to the Bronze Age. In 1986, the French scholar Bernard Sergent concluded that the 'Aryans' – the cultural ancestors of, among others, the English, Greeks, Irish, Iranians and the peoples of northern India – had been practising homosexual initiation rites way back in 3000 or 4000 or 6000 BC in order to ensure the maturation of boys.

But that was by no means the end of it. Noting the similarities between the sperm-rites of the Aryans and of the tribes of Papua New Guinea, off the coast of northern Australia, a Dutch scholar suggested they may have shared a common origin, dating back to c 8000 BC. Weston La Barre, however, went one step further. Putting the Victorian idea that masturbation made one an imbecile alongside evidence for head-hunting among early hominids, he suggested that, to our very dim and distant ancestors, sperm, bone marrow and brain matter were one and the same life-substance – a sex-belief that he could trace back over 250,000 years to the Old Stone Age and the time of the Neanderthals.

Perhaps only the Foucauldians have been able to top that. Adducing evidence for a completely different sexuality in ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, they claim that human sexuality itself is a cultural artefact. This throws into question what had hitherto been considered a rather important stage in the history of life on earth: the invention of sexual reproduction by the class of bacteria known as Eukaryotes in approximately 1.5 billion years BC.

Overcompensating
One suspects, looking back, that historians may have become a little overexcited when they first found themselves in Clio's bedroom. Or perhaps beneath the self-confidence one can still detect signs of low self-esteem. Suspecting that other historians remain somewhat disdainful about their chosen field, historians of sex could be accused of overcompensating, making extravagant claims for the importance of their evidence, anxious to prove their subject significant and, above all, to show themselves to be serious.

Certainly the temperature of much academic work on sexuality seems to decrease in inverse proportion to the temperature of the topic. Historians attempt to reduce the heat of their material through abstract language, tables and statistics, technical terms, pedantic readings of texts and images, and, occasionally, frigid prose, as if it were a question of steel production rather than desire.

Perhaps we take it all too seriously. Perhaps by zooming in on sex too closely, we are sometimes missing where the action really is. Perhaps by following too closely the prurient trails left by long-dead peoples, we are being led astray. Perhaps by being so earnest about sex, we are failing to get the jokes.

Asking questions
Certainly, like all historians, historians of sex are always in danger of falling victim to the idea that their sources are there to reveal things to posterity – a big mistake. They have been greatly influenced by anthropologists over the last few decades, but they must never forget the difference between the two disciplines.

Historians don't elicit information; they are students of what past societies chose to leave behind, and people in the past, like people in the present, were far more interested in their own contemporaries than they were in us. Before they start drawing conclusions from the evidence, historians of sex always need to ask with intelligence, energy and determination such questions as: How did this evidence I am looking at come to be here? Why was the earl of Rochester so publicly obscene? Why did courtiers write to their monarchs like lovers? Why did monarchs respond in kind? How did homosexual Ganymede come to decorate the doors of St Peter's in Rome?

The private nature of sex makes us believe that we are eavesdropping on private lives. But sex can also be stagey, and in many cases, the private documents we study were not whispering secretly but broadcasting rather loudly to their world.

The shock of the old
Nevertheless, when some of the wilder claims have been forgotten, there will still be plenty of evidence that different cultures and civilisations have done interesting and unexpected things with the erotic feelings and bodily functions with which nature has endowed us. The history of sex has few rivals when it comes to provoking in the reader a proper historical frisson, that shock of the old that is the modern historian's bull's-eye.

Moreover, research into sexual culture can lead to unexpected insights into other aspects of the past. Why in Renaissance Italy did prostitutes steal people's hats? Why were apothecary shops pick-up joints? Why did the patrons of London's Molly Houses (gay brothels) stage mock births? Why did the Spartans sacrifice to Eros before battle? Why did American Puritans talk of snogging Christ?

Broadening experiences
Above all, the careful study of the past has the power to shake us out of our own preconceptions about sex. The sexual act itself, it emerges, has a history. For many peoples, intercourse was not the aggressive act that is reflected in our own startling array of aggressive language, but a dangerous exchange, a loss of precious fluids (including the marrow and brain matter) or even a strange 'mixing' of bodies. In the ancient world, to take one example, it is clear that the monstrous image of the hermaphrodite – half-man, half-woman – was an image of conjugal harmony, an image of unity between husband and wife.

The best work in the field of sexual history can be highly effective in broadening our images and experiences of what desire is, what 'intercourse' is, what the body is, what the mouth is, what the person is, what privacy is, what love is, what sex is, what it means to be compromised.

Drawing conclusions
Can we draw any conclusions about the past of sex in Europe as we look back from the beginning of the third millennium? Despite all the changes and developments, I will risk a few generalisations. On the one hand, in the past there was always a great deal of suspicion about who was seen with whom and where and, related to that, a much greater sensitivity to degrees of intimacy – being alone in a room with someone, talking with someone, going into someone's house. On the other hand, the past seems to have been a much more intimate world, where the sharing of beds need have no sexual significance, yet sex might pop up in the most unexpected places.

Perhaps these apparent contradictions could be resolved with a little effort, but no one is saying that hypocrisy is a modern invention. At any rate, the historian of sex must always be alive to the possibility that something that seems quite innocent to us could be seen as scandalous to them, or that something that seems to us quite shocking would scarcely have raised an eyebrow back then.

The sexual revolution of the Sixties did not happen over night, and it still encounters fierce resistance in many quarters. Older generations, moreover, were not nearly as benighted when it comes to sex as we sometimes like to believe. However, from the perspective of 3,000 years of European history, it does seem safe to conclude that we really are now living on a different planet, that a lost civilisation of sex is receding from us into the past.

James Davidson is reader in ancient history at the University of Warwick and teaches courses on ancient sexuality and ancient food. Among other things, he is the author of Courtesans and Fishcakes (London, 1997) and contributed a chapter on 'Private life' to Classical Greece, edited by R Osborne (Oxford, 2000). He is also the author of The Greeks and Greek Love: A radical reappraisal of homosexuality in ancient Greece (London, 2007).