Life and Death in Ancient Colonies

Abstract

Introduction Sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean colonial world is a tropos that appears in the work of Foucault. In Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (Foucault 2008), a set of lectures focused on the correlation between morality and power, Foucault relates the story of Plato's visit to the Greek colony of Syracuse and the horror Plato felt upon seeing that the Greek colonists lived in an Italic way , going from feast to feast, eating until they were full, and never sleeping a night without company (Plato, Letters VII, 326b). Plato's negative reaction to the intimate relations and the sense of pleasure of the Syracuse people of the fourth century bce proves that in the ancient Greek colonies, sexuality was not a matter of the simple transposition of the intimate relations prevailing in the founding metropolis. Foucault's work has had a clear influence on the study of sexuality in antiquity, particularly in the field of Greek and Roman studies (Halpering et al. 1990; Larmour et al. 1998). The continuous references to intimate relations in antiquity in the writings of this French thinker have caused an explosion of studies on this topic. Most of these studies are proposals that endorse Foucault's constructivist perception and his vision of the relationship between sexuality and power.

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