Content area
Full Text
SEXUAL MORALITY IN ANCIENT ROME. BY REBECCA LANGLANDS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. vii, 399.
DESPITE ITS TITLE, Langlands's study is more accurately an examination oipudicitia in the Roman literary tradition. While book-length studies have been done on the near Greek equivalent of sophrosyne and also on aidos, Langlands's book is the first comprehensive study of sexual virtue in the Roman world. Her focus is on the use oipudicitia from the second century b.c.e. to the second century c.E. She argues that pudicitia, along with its opposite impudicitia, were key ethical concepts throughout the history of Rome and that their study "offers us an entry point of rich potential into Roman morality and culture" (3) and provides "a new route to studying ideologies of sex in Roman culture, one which allows us to move beyond the idea of penetration, of sex as necessarily phallic and involving activity and passivity . . . and beyond the male desiring subject, to deal with women, children and even slaves as moral subjects" (7). She thus offers an alternative to Foucault's approach to Roman sexuality and ethics.
Langlands's method is a close reading of pudicitia in a broad number of texts. She examines key passages on pudicitia in Livy, Valerius Maximus, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, ps.-Quintilian, Tacitus, and Suetonius and includes a brief look at Plautus, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius. Langlands focuses on pudicitia because it is "a peculiarly Roman concept" (2), having no English derivative and thus no pre-assigned meaning. She is sensitive to socio-cultural contexts in her readings, but her application of social and anthropological theory is not well developed. Her interest is in how gender affects the Roman understanding of pudicitia, whether pudicitia is a physical state or has a psychological component, and how it relates to status differentiation and to an ethics of power in ancient Rome.
The book is organized into seven chapters with an introduction and short conclusion. She begins with a critique of common English translations oipudicitia and suggests "sexual virtue" as the best English equivalent for the term. The first chapter looks at the cult of pudicitia and thus Pudicitia as a goddess, showing how sexual virtue was important not just for...