The Dacre Lecture 2025: Notes for a history of sexualities in the Hellenistic age
Group of Aphrodite, Pan and Eros, found in the House of the Poseidoniastai of Beryttos on Delos, Aphrodite attempts to fend off Pan who makes erotic advances, National Archaeological Museum of Athens Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Professor John Ma (Columbia) will give the Dacre Lecture (held in association with the History Faculty)
The history of sexuality in the Hellenistic period is an odd gap, both in histories of ancient sexuality (which—starting with Foucault!—jump from the late Classical period to the Roman empire) and in histories of the Hellenistic period. The historiographical reasons for this gap are not too diffcult to divine, rooted as they are in the constitutions of the various sub-disciplines of “Classics”. But the materials for a history of Hellenistic sexualities are as varied as the Hellenistic world itself, to the point that the challenge is the elaboration of an account which does not merely reflect current concerns and conceptions of the period. One particular and well-known test-case is the cluster of evidence, literary (bravura pieces of Hellenistic poetry) and documentary (erotic magic), relating to female desire and abandonment. This test-case might be related to new social realities (notably the mobility of young elite men) but also constitutes a particular example of the creation of influential norms of romantic behaviour.
John Ma joined the Department of Classics at Columbia University in 2015, after working at Corpus Christi College and the Faculty of Classics at Oxford for fifteen years. Before that, he worked in the Classics Department at Princeton (during which period he lived in New York). He received a BA (Literae Humaniores) and DPhil (Ancient History) from Oxford University. His main interests lie in the history of the ancient Greek world and its broader context (including the ancient near-east). Within Greek history, he is particularly interested in the handling of epigraphical and archaeological evidence, historical geography, and the complexities of the Hellenistic world. His research tries to combine philological attentiveness (especially in the case of Greek inscriptions), interpretive awareness (for literary but also documentary evidence), groundedness in materiality and concrete space, and a feeling for legal, social and economic realities.
