History is Sexy

...or full of sex we could say. While every generation likes to think it invented sex and drugs history tells a different story (or the same one depending on how you look at it), the writer of Ecclesiastes had it right when he said "There is nothing new under the sun."

If you know very little about the ancient city caught in a disastrous moment of history, the one thing you are probably going to be familiar with in Pompeii are some of the references to sex found there. The guide knew this and made it the highlight of  the tour saving it for the end. The brothel is one of the most interesting attractions.




This was a port city bringing people from all over the known world to buy whatever she was selling. One of the things the city was offering up was sex. Lest you get lost in your search for the pleasure house there were clever markers in the street pointing the way.

Once inside you needn't know the language to make your wishes known. Pictures over the different rooms depicted it all in fairly graphic detail, the richly colored paint is preserved and the images are still visible much to the delight of the adults on the tour. Oddly, the students seemed bored, but then they've grown up with cable and the internet. Of course as you can imagine it takes a lot, quite a lot to shock a suitcase. We do after all spend at inordinate amount of time in hotel rooms.



A couple of days later in Delphi, Greece ( a sleepy little town without even ONE stoplight) Madame Owner and her daughter were shopping in a little mom and pop store that looked like The Oracle was probably a regular customer. A foreign mustiness hung in the air.  Many items on the shelves were covered with dust and the woman behind the counter was the epitome of the frumpy 1950s European grandmother. Her grandchildren were running around the store and when MO was checking out she noticed a rack of playing cards next to the counter depicting different sex acts. In the states it would have been classified as porn. MO and her daughter looked first at each other, then at the grandmother, then at the children. As soon as they got out of the store they erupted in astounded chit chat about how in America that grandmother would have been mortified by those cards in the presence of her grandchildren.  In the other shops up and down the street they saw similar items, pictures and statues, that looked extremely out of place in a public setting to Americans, except perhaps in the French Quarter.

Part of the reason for that is that they would have been out of place in public settings to the ancient Greeks also. Thomas Cahill explains in his book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: "Almost all direct references to sex in Greek art are brutish, comic, or intended for private use..."

After describing a couple of household items depicting sex acts he writes: " ...but neither belonged in a public space where only ideal dignity should reign."

Huh. To this suitcase it sounds kind of like what we could say about bachelorette party decor and risque gag gifts on birthdays. 

So the Greeks are misrepresenting things a tad by pandering to the tourist in a way that coaxes embarrassed giggles, but they are proving an enduring truth; the more things change the more they stay the same.