The Reign of the Phallus; sexual politics in ancient Athens

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. First edition (presumed; no earlier dates stated). Paperback. Extremely mild rubbing to corners, faint soiling to front cover and fore-edges, else near fine(+).. Black illus octavo, viii, 477 pages, b&w illustrations, 24 cm. At once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens. The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy. This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus"--Men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men. In her elegant and lucid text Eva Keuls not only examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus, but also uncovers an intense counter-movement--the earliest expressions of feminism and antimilitarism. -- Publisher description. Contents: Military expeditions, protest, lament, and scandal -- Attic mythology: barren goddesses, male wombs, and the cult of rape -- The phallus and the box: the world seen in the shapes of human genitals -- Bearing children, watching the house -- Brides of death, in more ways than one -- The Athenian prostitute: a good buy in the agora -- The whore with the golden heart, the happy hooker, and other fictions -- Two kinds of women: the splitting of the female psyche -- The sex appeal of female toil -- Easier to live with than a wife: the concubine -- The boy beautiful: replacing a woman or replacing a son? -- Learning to be a man, learning to be a woman -- Sex among the barbarians -- Classical tragedy: weaving men's dream of sexual strife -- Sex antagonism and women's rituals -- Love, not war: protest in the arts and on the streets. Women -- Greece -- History.