An ancients’ guide to sexual incontinence
From our UK edition
King’s College Cambridge has lost (according to the papers) a ‘famous’ classicist, who resigned because he slobbered wet kisses all over an unimpressed woman. But everyone knows there is only one famous classicist, and she is not at King’s. The classicist at issue surely cannot have been paying too much attention to the literature which one assumes he has studied, because Eros was seen as a sickness, a madness, a god who robs us of our wits, creating a strong and obsessive desire (‘desire doubled’ as an ancient puts it). Plato saw sexual incontinence as a ‘disease of the soul’. Sophocles thought of sex as a ‘mad and savage master’.
