This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual (...) austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

The variably sequenced tripartite noun phrase, παῖδες, παρθένοι, and γυναῖκες, is shown to be a coordinated noun series signifying “girls, virgins, and women,” not, as hitherto interpreted, παῖδες as “male youths” or as “boy and girl children” plus “virgins and women.” Further, “virgins” in this phrase is primarily an age designation meaning “emergent adolescent or virgin-aged girls.” The tripartite phrase is thus female-specific, and it reflects the three life stages of underage girlhood, emergent adolescent “virginhood” (or maidenhood), and womanhood as (...) a sexually active wifehood and procreative motherhood. In relation to female groups, the tripartite phrase refers to females of mixed ages from girlhood to child-bearing womanhood. Although important in itself for raising the social visibility of girls and women in antiquity, this semantic argument also brings forth important new evidence from the orator Hyperides, the Peripatetic Clearchus, the historian Diodorus, and the Roman imperial-era Adoulis inscription about the sexual tenor and sexually acquisitive goals of populace-ravaging warfare against underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women. The Neoplatonist Proclus discloses the resultant social availability of underage girls, virgin-aged girls, and women to be sexually objectified and maltreated. These new insights reaffirm the value of linguistics and philology as powerful tools of socio-historical inquiry. (shrink)

Though long regarded as a scene of mother-daughter domesticity during peacetime, Iliad 16.7–11 reveals the destruction of normal life for a daughter and her mother on the verge of being captured by ancient Greek warriors. As such it provides exemplary insight into this fundamental aspect of ancient warfare. Further, as reinterpreted here, the simile gains great dramatic and emotive power, strengthens the Homeric characterization of Achilles as a forthright speaker given to poetic realism, and heightens the tragedy of Patroclus by (...) revealing how Achilles by his own admission fails to fulfill his protective role as Patroclus' warrior mother. (shrink)