ABOUT BOOK

Studying the relationship between disease and fertility in antiquity is challenging. ~The first difficulty is establishing the presence, and then prevalence, ~of any particular condition before an assessment can be made of its demographic ~impact. In the case of what are now called sexually transmitted infections ~(STIs), the empirical obstacles to identifying such infections in the ~classical world are exacerbated by the moralizing that attends discussions of ~sexual practice and that has so strongly characterized the ways sexual behavior ~and pathology have been, and continue to be, conceptually conjoined. Julius ~Rosenbaum’s influential and exhaustive nineteenth-century exploration of ~the ancient history of syphilis (broadly construed), for example, is based on ~the assumption that venereal diseases are caused by the “abuse” of the genital ~organs for nonprocreative purposes. Their history is, therefore, the history ~of human “lasciviousness and debauchery,” and there was so much of that ~in classical Greece and Rome that syphilis and all kinds of genital afflictions ~necessarily followed.