Erotic Letters of Ancient Rome

Long before phones allowed for sexting, how did the Ancient Romans exchange their illicit thoughts and desires? And what did a Roman dick pic look like? Joining Kate today to explore erotic letters from antiquity to the modern day is Owen Hodkinson, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Cultures at Leeds University. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:06Kate Lister?

  Hello my lovely Bertwixters, it's me Kate Lister and you are listening to Bertwixter Sheets. And in case you're a newbie, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adulty subjects you should be an adult too. And if you're not all of those things, then pffft, we don't want you here, you're too sensitive, you're just gonna spoil it for the rest of us.

• 2:28Kate Lister?

  And for everyone else, right, on with the show!

• 2:36Kate Lister?

  Oh hello Bertwixters, I will be with you in just a minute. Let me finish this letter. Forever yours, Miss Lister. Envelope closed, wax sealed, drying, perfect. Handwritten letters are such a lost art, aren't they? And the erotic handwritten letter is an even greater lost art. At a time when sexting a saucy tit pic or a lazy you up is all too easy, how did people in history exchange their deepest desires and share their wildest fantasies with each other? Especially when you consider that literacy rates weren't exactly thriving. And yet, it was done. And I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to find out all the filthy details, right after I have posted this letter.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  What do you look for in a man?

• 3:25Speaker 05

  Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, d'ry.

• 3:52Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Bertwixter Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. The world of academia can be a stuffy and prudish place, believe me, I have done the legwork. And that's in 2025. But imagine how historians and academics in the Victorian era reacted when they found smutty letters from ancient Rome. Oh, scandalous. It's safe to say... Did not fit in with the lofty ideals of ancient Rome that they had. What illicit ideas were shared in antiquity? Was there such a thing as a Roman dick pic? How were same-sex desires expressed? And how did power dynamics play out in such correspondences? Well, taking us back to the evidence today is Owen Hodkinson,

• 4:35Kate Lister?

  Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Culture at Leeds University. Quills and papyrus is at the ready, Betwixters, let's do this.

• 4:47Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Owen Hodkinson, how are you doing?

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, not too bad, thank you. You all right?

• 4:56Kate Lister?

  I'm doing okay, but we're here to talk about your research on erotic letters or love letters or both of them. So Owen, how did you get into this research?

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Well, I basically was looking for something to do my PhD on in classics. And I had done some work in my masters on literature, Greek literature under the Roman Empire. I was looking for stuff that hadn't been really studied a great deal. And that's how I came upon a bunch of literary letters by these Greek authors of the second and third century AD, some of which were love letters, not all of them. But I wrote my PhD about these letter collections and have been kind of working on them ever since.

• 5:39Kate Lister?

  Would you make a distinction between love letters and erotic letters?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yes and no. So there's, I mean, they're all letters to do with Eros, the Greek god of love and the Greek word Eros that means love, but in a kind of sexual desire way, rather than kind of platonic or familial love. So a love letter would be kind of under that categorization as kind of romantic love, but it also could just be purely about sex. Could be pure filth, some of the examples are. And they would all come under this kind of erotic letters stroke love letters category.

• 6:12Kate Lister?

  So as soon as somebody mentions a willy, it's erotic now?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yes, I think so.

• 6:18Kate Lister?

  That's not a very academic-y way of putting it, is it? When we think of love letters, erotic letters, I'm trying to imagine what an ancient Greek love letter would even have looked like. Would this, I mean, physically, would it have been on a scroll? Would it have been stone tablets? That would have been difficult to deliver to somebody.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so ancient kind of real letters written and sent in the ancient world by Greeks and Romans would have been mostly on papyrus or on wood tablets.

• 6:44Speaker 07

  It's so more easily transportable than your kind of stone inscriptions.

• 6:48Kate Lister?

  And are they vastly different from what we think of as as love letters today? Is it still, well, I mean, how have they changed? Is it still, oh, you're amazing, you're brilliant, you're lovely, da, da, da, da. Is it quite familiar when you're reading through it?

• 7:01Speaker 07

  Some of it is and some of it isn't. So I I think there's certainly things that are recognisable and and some of that is due to the influence of these ancient letters on on modern kind of authors and love poets that that have kind of influenced people educated in literature who then write love letters and want to kind of affect a nice kind of poetic or romantic style that would imitate this this literature. So you get a lot of things going back to antiquity about, you know, romantic expressions of longing and separation and absence, which of course is what motivates a letter. You write to someone because you're not in the same place as them. So a lot of ancient love letters and erotic letters are on about centrally kind of the idea of missing someone, longing for them, wanting to see them or worrying about them in their absence and so on.

• 7:46Speaker 07

  But, yeah, I mean, it's it's the the whole ancient world context is very different in in a lot of ways as well, in ways that I'm sure we're going to go into more. But there are letters that we would classify as kind of definitely under the heading of Eros, the god of sexual love, but we wouldn't call them love letters because they're between people of unequal status, so to an enslaved person or to someone who would be an underage person in today's world, but expressions of sexual desire towards those people who might not have any choice in the matter.

• 8:18Kate Lister?

  Were these letters, or at least the ones you've been looking at, were they always supposed to be kept private? I'm thinking of something like Saint Paul's letters to the Corinthians, like it was written to the Corinthians, but it's broader audience. Were these always supposed to be private?

• 8:30Speaker 07

  Yes, so the kind of the real examples that we have, there are plenty of literary examples which are imitating that kind of private correspondence, but but they're kind of actually pieces of literature meant to be read by others. But the the real examples that we have are are intimate and they refer to things such as the writer writing in their own hand and the recipient valuing that, because in the ancient world, people are going to use scribes most. People who have got the time and leisure to be writing about non-business transactional, you know, notes are going to use a scribe, but they valued, you know, even if it's between the emperor or future emperor and his lover, as we've got some examples of, writing in their own hand when it's this kind of intimate and private kind of correspondence.

• 9:15Kate Lister?

  Could you imagine being a scribe who had to do that work, though? That would be like, imagine like having to get a third person in to do your sexting for you. That would, that's, that's a hell of a job.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, definitely. So that's why they mostly kind of valued doing it in your own hand. But you mentioned sexting and obviously that's a good comparison. I mentioned some of these, we might not consider love letters, but are basically just kind of filthy propositions. Some of these are clearly much more like sexting than, than what we would call a love letter, but it all kind of comes under this heading of erotic letters.

• 9:45Kate Lister?

  Is that because academia, as marvelous as it is and the amazing things that it has done, has been ever so slightly squeamish about this kind of stuff that they'd prefer to kind of call it a love letter instead of what it actually is?

• 10:02Speaker 07

  I think, yeah, that's certainly part of it. And also, I suppose there's just, there's not a huge amount when you consider how big a kind of form the love letter is in the modern world. So if you say, what kinds of letter are there? Well, letters of invitation, letters of recommendation, love letters. But if you look at antiquity, there's hardly any. So it kind of makes sense to group the kind of love letters and the kind of more sex letters basically under the same heading and then study them. And of course, there are crossovers in the kinds of expression they use. And one letter could contain both. It could be romantic and refer to kind of physical expressions of that romantic love as well.

• 10:38Kate Lister?

  So whose love letters, ancient sexting, erotic letters, have you got? What sources are you working with here?

• 10:46Speaker 07

  So in terms of real letters, as I said, there's not really a great number surviving. And so we have basically just a handful. I mean, literally, you could count them on on less than than all ten fingers, kind of surviving letters that you could classify as love letters or erotic letters from the first century A D until the kind of sixth century A D. So mostly, these are letters on papyrus. Some of them are from a wife to a husband or vice versa, and some of them are between a master and an enslaved recipient and various other configurations, combinations of people.

• 11:23Kate Lister?

  It's interesting there that you said it would be an enslaved person who is the recipient of this, because I but maybe this is just my not understanding it, but I wouldn't have thought an enslaved person could have read that.

• 11:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I mean, there's the example, the one example I have in mind specially with that is there's there's a papyrus letter from the first century A D in Greek, which is basically a sexual proposition by two men to another man that includes a crude illustration as well as what they're propositioning him. I could read that one out if that would be.

• 11:53Kate Lister?

  Please do, Owen. I think I think we need you to do that. Yes.

• 11:56Speaker 07

  So it says, Appion and Epimas proclaim to their best beloved Epaphroditos that if you allow us to bugger you, and if it's fine with you, we will not thrash you any longer if you allow us to bugger you farewell. And then the drawing is crude in both senses, as in it's so badly drawn that they've labeled it with obscene Greek words, meaning the bellend and the asshole, to kind of illustrate what they're propositioning. So the scholarly kind of consensus about this letter is that it's they're just kind of messing around, really. They're writing it to someone who they didn't need to write to, because if they're in a position to kind of thrash him or have anal sex with him, and those are

• 12:39Speaker 07

  the kind of, you know, I'll let you off the thrashing if you let us do this, that's obviously not someone who's got an equal status and is in a position to say no, right? So the enslaved man there might not have any ability to read it. Some enslaved people, of course, could read because sometimes scribes were and some of them were tutors. So it could have been someone who could have read it, but also there's no need for them to write this letter if they're threatening the These things presumably they're going to carry it out in person and they can just get on and do it. So it's more for their own kind of they're imitating the kinds of formal approach of a love letter or erotic letter by having this kind of farewell and they proclaim to their best beloved a paphroditus. But within that, it's just a threat of sexual assault, basically, as an alternative to a different form of assault.

• 13:23Kate Lister?

  And there's two authors, or at least there's two people addressing aphroditus.

• 13:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 13:28Kate Lister?

  I've never had a sext or a love letter or a threat or anything else from two people before. Who, who on earth would, I know, I know, we'll never know, but who do you think they were? Masters in a household, brothers, like what?

• 13:41Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, it seems most likely that they would obviously be free members of the household. So they could be two brothers or other relations, free men of the household. And the other must be an enslaved person of the household, which could range from, you know, it's a fairly high status, one, a tutor or a scribe, down to a much lower one, but probably lower is likely in this situation because of the, the way that they're proposing to treat him.

• 14:07Kate Lister?

  It's nuts, isn't it, that somebody wrote that down thousands of years ago and that's what survived?

• 14:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:14Kate Lister?

  That's the subject of intense academic study, just this throwaway, presumably it was a throwaway piece of writing. They weren't intending it for, to be one for the ages.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly. And then the only reason we have a few letters like this is because, precisely because of the kind of rubbish dumps of Oxy-Rhynchus and other places in Egypt. So the heat, the heat of, and the dry conditions preserved a lot of our papyri from the ancient world. So we have

• 14:39Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  letters from there and not very many from, from other places. And that's why we have much more kind of literary letters that imitate these things rather than these real examples.

• 14:55Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Owen after this short break.

• 15:13Kate Lister?

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• 17:52Kate Lister?

  I suppose with things like this as well, like trying to understand what the context of it is, is incredibly difficult. I went to Pompeii recently and like looking at all the graffiti on the walls. Some of it is written to other people. Some of it is kind of in this vein of threats and things. But then some of it, you're looking at it like it would say like Julie Arness's ass can be bought for two donkeys or something mad like that. And you're thinking, that might be the Roman equivalent of like writing your friend's phone number in the toilet booth and put in get it here on it because you think it's really funny.

• 18:22Speaker 07

  Yes, definitely. Some of these things can be. And that letter that I read out is clearly kind of distasteful as it is to modern audiences, but it is playful. It is kind of a game to them. But yes, of course, those kind of, some of those things in Pompeii and other Roman cities that would have been like it would have been kind of advertising services in a brothel, of course. So we have kind of ancient letters that are literary exercises, but purporting to be from courtesans of the ancient world to and from their lovers as well, lovers stroke clients.

• 18:50Kate Lister?

  So if we're thinking about love letters, like what you think, so I'm thinking Ovid, he's the sort of the great, well, maybe he's not the great romantic writer. How is, tell us a bit about who Ovid was and how he was understood at the time.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  So yeah, Ovid, first century B.C., first century A.D., Roman poet. He's kind of fairly mainstream now and he wrote across a variety of poetic genres. So some of them were love poems. But in terms of what we're talking about today, the letters. That he wrote, the most famous collection of letters are called the Heroides, they're letters from heroines. So these are purely kind of fictional and mythological set, mythologically set letters from the heroines of ancient Greek myth to the men who abandoned them. So the first letter is from Penelope to Odysseus or to Ulysses, the Roman version of his name. There's a letter from Medea to Jason and so on. So there are letters. And they're all predicated on this idea of absence and separation, which is why you write a letter.

• 19:46Speaker 07

  So, you know, he's chosen situations from mythology where a Greek hero has abandoned a lover or a wife, gone off with someone else and imagining, you know, this is the love letter that they would have written. But as so often, because letters are about absence and not sent to someone you're with, they're kind of unrequited love letters and they're kind of bemoaning their fate having been abandoned. Some of them are suicidal, talking about how they're going to kill themselves because they can't have the man who's abandoned them. And most of them are tearful.

• 20:17Kate Lister?

  He's not threatening to bugger anybody though, is he? I mean, but he does get quite saucy, does Ovid.

• 20:24Speaker 07

  Yes, he does at times, but more so in his other love poetry than in these these letters. Because the letters that he writes are, so he has other collections called the Amores, the love poems, and a collection of kind of didactic poetry, so instruction about how to court and so on, both from the male and female perspective. So there you get some kind of physical advice and physical suggestiveness and so on. Within the love letters, because they're supposed to be from great ladies, you know, kind of queens and princesses. And Penelope is a royal woman of of kind of noble, even kind of semi divine birth. You're talking about much more delicate expressions and it's also kind of writing about, it's over now, or is there any chance that he'll come back to me?

• 21:09Speaker 07

  But yeah, it's kind of beneath their dignity to be mentioning the sexual side of things.

• 21:14Kate Lister?

  They wouldn't be scribbling bellends on their love letters, would they? That's no, no.

• 21:20Speaker 07

  Interestingly, what they do and what he does to kind of play around with this kind of physical manifestation of of the. That's more than just the text itself is he has these women talk about the tears that they're shedding smudging the lines of the inks that they're writing. So on several occasions, you have examples of whatever blocks you shall see my tears have made. But tears too have nonetheless with the weight of words. So it's kind of, you know, you you might not be able to read this properly. That's because I'm all emotional and I'm crying is smudging the ink. But you should read into the tears what I feel and and and take that as well. And in one of these cases as well, you've got plots that are caused by a woman's blood. She says, my right hand holds a pen, my left a naked sword and the paper's lying loosely in my lap. So

• 22:06Speaker 07

  she's in the act of committing suicide while she's writing this letter and the blood drops are smudging the letter.

• 22:13Kate Lister?

  That reminds me randomly of Lady Caroline Lamb writing to Byron and sending him clumps of her pubic hair that she said were were also covered in blood. Nice Caroline. Thank you very much for that. But maybe there was a classical influence there.

• 22:28Speaker 07

  I think so. I mean, on the romantic poets, I mean, of course, well, anyone up until the early 20th century, who's kind of in the educated elites, able to write literature and poetry and so on. In Europe has read classical Greek and Latin, you know, a versed in both those languages and and reading these literature and also reading translations of them. So clearly there's influences and continuities between these kind of forms of expression as well. Where you get, you know, references to tears, references to kisses and these kind of literary games with with the idea that the, you know, that the text is illegible because of my tears and so on. That could sometimes be an affectation or a literary game rather than rather than a reality like it is for Ovid's Heroides.

• 23:11Kate Lister?

  It's a good move, that one. I'm gonna store that away and make a little mental note. It doesn't work with texts, though. So that comes with it. You can't say my text is all.

• 23:18Speaker 07

  You do have to revert to snail mail to to make it work. That's the only thing.

• 23:22Kate Lister?

  Damn it, yes, good point. But how, let's think about how influential Ovid was because today he's he's one of the giants of ancient classical literature. Was he at the time and how long did it take for him to kind of garner that reputation?

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I mean, it was quite slow, really. I mean, he wasn't regarded the most highly by kind of classical scholars and they're essentially, you know, the gatekeeper just to kind of decide what gets translated, what gets published in an edition. And what gets kind of studied and brought therefore before a wider audience. So especially these love letters, they were seen as having been written early in his career as being minor works. And because they're on the theme of love and, you know, the kind of high, yeah, the high minded classical scholars are interested in, you know, great works of literature about the Roman Empire and kings and emperors. And, you know, so Virgil's Aeneid and Horace's odes on kind of weighty themes and meditations about the nature of human life and so on.

• 24:23Speaker 07

  This kind of romantic stuff really wasn't studied a huge amount, even in comparison with some of Ovid's other works, which themselves were kind of relegated below people like Virgil.

• 24:34Kate Lister?

  When does he start to be rediscovered? Or like an interest in romance in general, I'm thinking, because if you think of like some of the, like, you know, the Aeneid and Homer's work, there is romance in there. There's definitely romantic stuff going on, but it's not like the films today where that's absolutely central. It's almost like a side quest. They're interested in military stuff, heroism and, you know, the greater glory.

• 25:01Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, I mean, there are genres from antiquity like comedy that focus on love and from those are kind of what leads to our kind of rom com and kind of romantic novel genres ultimately. But they, again, because of that kind of love story being the central plot, like the ancient novel as well, are kind of disregarded or overlooked by most scholars. I mean, Ovid, you know, he gets a first translation into English in fifteen sixty seven, George Turbeville's translation called Ovid's Heroical Epistles. So, you know, they're becoming accessible to ordinary people then, but still, there's still some kind of prejudice on the kind of, yeah, the gatekeepers, the scholars who decide what gets the most attention and kind of interpretation and so on.

• 25:46Kate Lister?

  So when these letters, the kind of the ones that you're working on, when they were rediscovered, was that by the Georgians and the Victorians? Because I love the fact that when they started to actually find this material and discover it, it really upset their notion of what the ancient Greeks and Romans were like.

• 26:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, so for most people, until you start having translations, of course, you can only access it if you can read the original Greek and Latin of these texts. And up till the Victorian era and beyond, to the mid 20th century, really, what gets chosen for, you know, a Penguin Classics treatment or the sort of earlier equivalents is the stuff that's deemed acceptable for a broad, you know, sort of modern society and a modern sort of popular moire. So the classicists themselves are going to be aware of all the kind of pederastic stuff and the references to buggery and the violent stuff, but they're not translating that. That, you know, you get editions and translations published that omit some of the kind of more racy

• 26:44Speaker 07

  and more explicit material. So really, it's only kind of if you're in the know and someone tells you secretly, you know, go and look in these books in the library and you can only read them in the original Greek or Latin, there's no translations available that you kind of discover about these things.

• 27:00Kate Lister?

  We should talk about the pederasty thing because it, I mean, even today, it can disrupt our estimation of the ancient world. There is a sense of like, oh, fuck. When they, you find it like, why did you have to do that? That, oh. But can you try and explain a little bit about what that was, what was going on?

• 27:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, I mean, in summary, classical Athenian society, which is where we have most of our evidence from the ancient world, so that's kind of 5th, 4th century B.C. Athens not only kind of thinks it's okay, but thinks it's a great thing among a kind of aristocratic society to have these pederastic relations. Plato writes a lot about it and kind of valorizes it. In his case, he's kind of valorizing a chaste version of it in which it's just kind of instruction by the older male to the younger male. But it's clear that that's not all that's going on in reality. And the Romans take that up and, you know, it becomes a big part of the literary tradition. And one kind of main theory that people put forward about all of this is that in societies where marriages are basically arranged most of the time,

• 28:02Speaker 07

  women aren't kind of coming and going and meeting people, there's no need for kind of romantic seduction, erotic persuasion. So if you like the chase, then you're Kind of going in for expressions like that to a beloved youth rather than a woman who you would just, you know, you would just speak to her parents and get married to her. There would be no kind of erotic persuasion going on. And that's not, you know, I don't want to erase, of course, the fact that there were, would have been people in antiquity who we would call today homosexual, who would have same sex desire. But this is a different phenomenon. This is a phenomenon where, where it's kind of socially sanctioned for an older man to, to go with a youth. And that the age range would vary from what we would definitely call off limits and underage today.

• 28:47Speaker 07

  Up to people who would be within age limits in some, you know, within the age of consent in, in some modern societies for, for same sex relations.

• 28:55Kate Lister?

  When we're thinking about same sex relations in general, and I'm being very reductive and crude here, but you sort of get this sense of like, the pederastic relationships are okay because the way they're understanding it is between dominant and submissive. And if you've got a young man, he's like a proxy woman standing in for that and he's the submissive one. But as soon as they get to be older, then you're running the risk of it's two active men together. And now, oh, that doesn't work anymore. How did they understand adult same sex relationships? Was that okay as well?

• 29:27Speaker 07

  No, that was basically frowned upon. That's not normalized at all in the same way that these pederastic ones were. So really, the, the only thing that's kind of falls within these norms that we would consider, you know, consenting adult same sex relationship. Is if the, the, the younger partner in this, in a kind of pederastic model would be towards the sort of upper age, you know, would be a kind of teenage post pubescent. You know, some of the literature would include that kind of thing and some of it would rule it out as, as them already being past their prime.

• 29:56Kate Lister?

  It's fascinating to me of like, what is the cutoff point of this? Was there an age? Was there a birthday? What was this?

• 30:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there's, it's very hard to pin this down because, you know, there's not a lot of reference to specifically ages. I mean, there are references. So a lot of the literature of this kind does reference kind of the first facial hair growing and therefore signs of pubescence and, and sort of first kind of hair growing anywhere else other than on the head as a sign. That you're coming to the end of your eligibility to be the younger partner and starting to be eligible to be a full man, a full kind of adult male, the older partner. But we do get exceptions to that. So some of my Greek love letters by philistrous, you know, talk about beards in this conventional way and say that's kind of ruling you out. But some of them kind of address a youth, but say, you know, I don't mind the fact that you've, that you're starting to grow your beard and it's handsome and so on. So

• 30:48Speaker 07

  you can encompass within the same literary erotic tradition.

• 30:52Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 30:52Speaker 07

  Something that's not pedrastic really, but it's using the same kind of literary tropes and the same language and so on.

• 30:59Kate Lister?

  Marcus Aurelius was writing love letters to another man when he was eighteen, wasn't he?

• 31:04Speaker 07

  That's right, yeah. Yeah. So Marcus Aurelius, who would be the emperor later, but isn't at this stage, he's the one that's famous in the first Gladiator film, of course.

• 31:13Kate Lister?

  Oh, they left that out, didn't they?

• 31:14Speaker 07

  Yes. He's writing to his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto. That relationship is in the second century A.D. It began when Marcus Aurelius was eighteen and Fronto was around thirty-nine. So really Marcus Aurelius is already eighteen, kind of older than you would normally consider the kind, this kind of model for pedrastic relationships in antiquity. But it's clearly in this model, you know, one is the tutor and the much older man and is, you know, in a position of authority and instruction. And he's learning everything from him about, including how to write about love. And so some of their letters are very, well, all of their letters, both in Latin and Greek, are very kind of literary. But there's a bunch of Greek ones that weren't rediscovered until the nineteenth century,

• 31:57Speaker 07

  which are all about their erotic relationship. And when they were rediscovered, it's the same with what we were talking about earlier with the Victorians and censorship. They were swept under the carpet. They weren't kind of published instantly in a Penguin Classics kind of equivalent of the day and trumpeted abroad. You know, people didn't really know about them. Hardly any, you know, even hardly any classicists knew about them until the last few decades. So, yeah, they're full of kind of these, the same literary languages of longing and burning with love, these kind of literary cliches that go into modern love letters and modern erotic poetry and so on as well. But with this kind of age gap and this instruction aspect of it. So, you know, he's an instructor in rhetoric

• 32:37Speaker 07

  and grammar and so on and literature, writing to him about Plato's texts that I referenced before that are about these, these pedrastic relationships in the classical era.

• 32:47Kate Lister?

  Any news on the lesbians at all? Do we have any letters from lesbians left to us?

• 32:53Speaker 07

  I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there.

• 32:55Kate Lister?

  I knew it.

• 32:56Speaker 07

  As so often, and especially in the ancient world, there is very little reference to same-sex desire between women. What there is doesn't come under love letters or erotic letters. So even the only kind of nod towards lesbianism that I can give you on this theme is there's a letter from Sappho to her former lover Phaon among these ovid heroines letters that, as I said, they're mostly mythological women, but this is the one exception. It's a real woman and he's chosen her because she's the famous love poet, of course. But this is a letter to a male person who's been her lover before, not a woman. And doing all of the same things that these heroines are doing, these mythological women crying about their, you know, their finished love or their unrequited love and so on.

• 33:48Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Owen after this short break.

• 34:08Speaker 01

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• 34:53Speaker 01

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• 34:59Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 35:28Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 35:40Kate Lister?

  It's amazing how little surviving evidence there is of Sappho at all, considering how big her name is and how influential she's gone on to be, that there's just tiny fragments of bits and pieces left.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yeah. And the reason we hold her name up so much more than the surviving remnants would suggest we might is because of these later poets like Ovid and so on, using her name, looking up to her, imitating her. Cattolus wrote poetry that's directly translated from, and then building from her poems, a Latin poet of the first century B.C. So the ancients have access, even in the imperial era, to much more of her poetry than we do, and they're building it in and building up that reputation. But we sadly don't have very much at all.

• 36:24Kate Lister?

  That must be so frustrating for you as a scholar, to be reading all these ancient texts by men going, "Oh, that one by Sappho was amazing, that was so good, but I'm not actually going to tell you what it was or reproduce it, I'm just going to tell you that it was dead good."

• 36:37Speaker 07

  Deeply frustrating.

• 36:41Kate Lister?

  If we're talking about the style of love letters, and they are sounding quite familiar, dodgy, pedagogic stuff aside, but this kind of, "I love you, I burn for you, I long for you", does that change as we're going through time? Or does that remain fairly consistent? I'm trying to think what a Renaissance love letter would be.

• 37:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it seems to remain fairly stable. I mean, one change that we do start to see... Is when the Roman Empire converts to Christianity and Christianity becomes the official religion. Of course, that does change the literary culture and therefore the writing culture in general. But even there, so we've got an example of a real letter from the sixth century A D where, you know, in this Christian context where they're still referencing Eros's arrows and Aphrodite and so on. And in these terms of burning with desire, et cetera. But into the Renaissance, I mean, these letters are still having an impact and influencing. So we've got, um, yeah, so I mean, the Greek letters by philistrous that I I mentioned. Some have argued that a few of those were inspiring some of Shakespeare's sonnets.

• 37:46Speaker 07

  And he, of course, wrote some that are to a young man that he's supposed to have been intimate with. There's no one's really made a cast iron case for that connection yet, but there's still work to be done there. But we know that his contemporary, the English poet Ben Johnson, did some poems, wrote some poems that are translations of some of these Philistery and Love Letters. That, you know, they're not letters anymore because he's translating his prose letters into English verse. So they're they're love poems and they don't pretend to be letters. They don't start off with a dear so and so or end up with a farewell. In this kind of period, we get real letters that use these kind of tropes. So this idea of the tears that Ovid has made famous and and translations and circulations of his text in Latin.

• 38:29Speaker 07

  From the, you know, the fifteen hundreds, as we've seen it onwards, are clearly having influence. So we've got a great example of a letter that Mozart wrote to his wife Konstanze in October seventeen ninety, where he starts off with the usual kind of longing and separation. If only I had a letter from you, everything would be all right. So a letter is trying to bridge the gap and the absence. The letter itself compensates in some way for not being with the person who's sending it. And you get all of these kind of contemporary examples where the the person's own handwriting is again being privileged and intimate, same as as in antiquity. But the the kind of the particular literary trope that goes all the way back to at least Ovid is in his postscript to this letter.

• 39:11Speaker 07

  Where he says, P S, while I was writing the last page, tear after tear fell on the paper. So you've got the exact same device of of the the ink being kind of affected by by the tears while writing.

• 39:24Kate Lister?

  And then he would wreck everything, wouldn't he, by talking about how often he'd been farting that day, if I remember my Mozart letters correctly.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  Yes, he is, he is quite playful. I mean, that postscript carries on, but I must cheer up. Catch an astonishing number of kisses are flying about. So he's kind of blowing kisses to her through the, through the letter and imagining her sort of catching them out of the air.

• 39:44Kate Lister?

  I love, I love Mozart's letters. They're absolutely bonkers. I think my absolute most favourite love letters, very erotic letters, the ones James Joyce sent to his wife. Have you, have you read those ones?

• 39:55Speaker 07

  Yes, I'm familiar with those.

• 39:57Kate Lister?

  They're absolutely filthy, aren't they?

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Yes, and those kind of examples are actually filthier than almost everything that we find from antiquity in, in letter form. I'm not saying there isn't filthy erotic poetry as well from antiquity, but yeah, that kind of explicit stuff is not really, not really much there in these ancient letters, apart from that, that first example I quoted.

• 40:17Kate Lister?

  And if anyone's listening, go and look at those letters up. But we should talk about somewhere where these letters did have a direct influence, and that's on none other than Oscar Wilde and Victorian society, because he frequently evoked classical antiquity and mythology, and even when he was on trial, he's evoking it, isn't he?

• 40:38Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, you know, he uses that as part of the defence of, of homosexual love, of course, in the trial, that the fact that it has these noble precedents and, you know, all the Victorians are fine with the Greeks and Romans and put them on a pedestal to other aspects, as to other aspects of their culture. But suddenly, if you engage in, in any same-sex shenanigans, then, then that's beyond the pale and, and the Greeks and Romans have nothing to teach us anymore. So there's this kind of double standard that he's alluding to. So, yeah, I mean, it's very interesting that Oscar Wilde, again, his circle, not him, not he himself as a writer, but people that he knows are kind of publishing in a magazine that he founded, for example, for a kind of private circulation, kind of

• 41:20Speaker 07

  subscription magazine, are writing English first translations of these letters of philosophers, who, again, is a, is a minor name in, in sort of studies of classical antiquity, but he keeps on coming up in these, in these odd places. So. There's a guy we don't know almost anything about called Percy Lancelot Osborne, who wrote several versions of Philostratus's love letters, some that were addressed to youths or to male youths in the original. And he turns some of them, interestingly, into heterosexual love poems, but some of them he keeps as same-sex ones. So, you know, Wilde and Co. are obviously aware of these really unstudied and, you know, at that stage, never been translated into English texts, which, as I said, you have to go and seek them out in the library

• 42:05Speaker 07

  and read them in the original if you want to know about these same-sex expressions of desire.

• 42:09Kate Lister?

  Love letters can be quite dangerous things, can't they? I mean, one of the best advice that you can give to young people today is never, ever, ever put your face in the photos. Just don't do it, ever. It's a bad move.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:20Kate Lister?

  But all throughout history, you do find examples of people being blackmailed by a former lover who's got their letters. I think that happened to Oscar Wilde, actually. There's some reference to, yeah. Wouldn't you just love to know what he was writing to people?

• 42:33Speaker 07

  Yes, definitely. But yeah, exactly. I mean, they are, I mean, we didn't have, they didn't have the problems of having your face in the photo back then, of course. But, you know, it can be very incriminating when you find love letters, erotic correspondence between same-sex couples, or in cases of adultery, even within heterosexual ones, of course, you know, could be uncovered and could be used to blackmail or to bring someone down, as happened with Wilde.

• 42:56Kate Lister?

  It's funny that we've never, we've never learned that lesson, that all throughout human history, we've been quite content to write down the most explicit and filthy, and actually write the evidence that it's happening in front of us.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  Yes. Well, I guess it's that notion of privacy, isn't it? I mean, you kind of assume when you're writing it that it's not going to be uncovered, but, you know, if someone...

• 43:15Kate Lister?

  And studied by academics hundreds of years.

• 43:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 43:18Kate Lister?

  Into the future. So, as a final question then, what do you think makes for a good love letter? As somebody that's studied erotic love letters and romantic verse from the ancient world, can you look at them and go, that's a good love letter? Or do you just kind of let them wash over you? Have they influenced you at all in your love letters?

• 43:39Speaker 07

  I don't remember ever actually writing a lot, well, maybe I was a teenager.

• 43:43Kate Lister?

  Scribbling.

• 43:44Speaker 07

  And yeah, they're not very useful for for kind of texts, as we said, for various reasons. But yes, I mean, in terms of the kind of things that stand out, it is those kind of expressions of of missing and longing and and burning with desire and so on, that kind of resonate through all the ancient and modern imitators.

• 44:02Kate Lister?

  It's very intense, isn't it? Do you just get this feeling that perhaps the intensity has wavered slightly in our modern era? Because if you got a love letter, first of all, an actual letter, that would be quite alarming, I think, to get a letter through the post now nowadays. But even if you're expecting it to open up and to be like, I burn for you, I love you, I can't read my tears, staining the the ink, you might have a restraining order. I don't know if we've lost something here.

• 44:26Speaker 07

  I think we probably have, yes. And I suppose, you know, these things are there in kind of romantic cliches. You know, the same as, you know, someone in a in a rom com turning up with a with musical instrument and serenading you outside your window. You know, the the kind of song and the poem are the place where you can express those things intensely. But even then, you know, kind of one man's romantic serenader isn't is another is the woman's stalker. Or someone that she needs to put a restraining order against sometimes. So, yeah, it's it's very much a matter of of perspective there.

• 44:58Kate Lister?

  All right. You have been wonderful to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? To write you romantic verses. Don't do that, anybody. Leave Owen alone.

• 45:08Speaker 07

  So, yeah, if you search for my name, there aren't many. Owen Hodkinson's University of Leeds will find me. And and there's if you put love letters in that search as well, you will find all sorts of information about the book, about the project and and the project as a whole.

• 45:21Kate Lister?

  Shall we give it the full title once more? Love Letters and Erotic Letters: Antiquity and Beyond. You have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 45:30Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me.

• 45:37Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Owen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You could even write us an erotic letter. And if you wanted to do that, then you can email at to us at [email protected]. Coming up, we've got episodes on dinosaur sex and Lilith, all coming your way. See, don't say we never give you anything. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheep, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 46:23Speaker 01

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• 47:04Speaker 01

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