Tuesday 10 December 2013

Rome: Sex & Freedom by Peter Brown | The New York Review of Books

Rome: Sex & Freedom by Peter Brown | The New York Review of Books


Nothing could be more different from the worldview of Achilles Tatius. For his heroes and heroines, sex is less about the will than about the great chain of being that linked humans to the gods and to the stars. Sex was the moment when human beings allowed themselves to sink back into the embrace of a universe into which their own bodies had been ingeniously woven. They would draw on the life-giving energies of a vast world. Sex was the gift of ever-present gods. Like wine, itself the gift of the god Dionysos, sex filled the body with “an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm energy was experienced as a communion” with the divine.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity