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Mention is made of "Maritimus licks your vulva for 4 As. He is ready to serve virgins as well." Presumably then there were male prostitutes for female clients in Pompeii also?
==Wiki Education assignment: Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius== This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2022 and 12 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mipsallison, JNRM Student, IsaHistorical, Helenliska (article contribs).
This is not a Commons category, and yet it seems that the only thing happening in this article is the endless addition of images, regardless of whether they replicate types of erotic imagery already illustrated or whether they contribute in art historical terms to understanding the development of erotic art by style or period. It's more than a little juvenile just to see how many naughty pictures you can find in Commons. I'm not commenting from a position of prudery (it's fair to say that I'm the primary contributor to the current version of Sexuality in ancient Rome, but what's the methodology? What are the criteria for culling the many possible illustrations in proportion to the text? Cynwolfe (talk) 15:22, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've just had my attention drawn to this page by a message on my talkpage, and I have a similar concern. In particular, there is an entire section dedicated solely to images of erotic art outside of Pompeii and Herculaneum, containing 27 images of greater or lesser relevance to the topic at hand. Is it really necessary to have three separate images of the same sculpture of Cupid and Psyche (neither of whom are mentioned in the text of the article)? How about this image, of a terracotta relief which was found in the Rhone Valley and produced over a century after the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum? I would certainly be inclined to cut down the number of images and retain only those which have some sort of relevance to the text of the article. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:07, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Completely agree. I read the comment on your talk page (since you mentioned it here) and there are good points there too – some of the images seem scanned from books that are not PD, and while that may or may not fly with 2D art, outside WP at least the copyright of a photo of 3D art attaches to the photo, not the age of the object photographed. The same contributor was doing this at the main Roman sexuality article, which I did go through to weed out for relevance and placement, but I'm not motivated to focus on this topic at present. I would applaud any gardening you'd care to do. Cynwolfe (talk) 23:03, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would agree that a major culling is needed. At the very least, the entire section on images outside the region in question should be removed – Aza24 (talk)05:28, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I've culled what I think are the most egregious inclusions from that particular section, though I wouldn't object if anyone bit the bullet and just removed the entire section. I have plenty of questions about the rest of the content, too – not least that any article on ancient Roman erotic art should probably address the question of whether e.g. tintinnabula were seen as erotic in the Roman period, and to what extent we define "erotic art" from ancient Rome by our own (and our Victorian ancestors') views on sexuality and morality... If inspiration hits I might take a crack at some of the rest of the article... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:18, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, I had written but not posted this comment earlier today, so I'll go ahead and post it now to concur, though indirectly is no longer apt.
Limiting the scope of the article to Pompeii and Herculaneum does seem to imply two things: a more focused archaeological spin on the topic, and how these excavations expanded modern understanding of the extent to which Romans incorporated subject matter that we consider sexual or "erotic" into everyday visual culture. So that's an issue of reception, which is in fact present in the article, though the narrative structure becomes ramshackle. The section on brothels is more interested in obscene graffiti – epigraphy, not art – and veers into content covered better at Prostitution in ancient Rome#Brothels and Lupanar. One of the scholarly questions pertaining to this material is whether too many "brothels" have been identified at P&H on the basis of sexually explicit wall painting.
And as Caeciliusinhorto indirectly pointed out, there's a question of how to define "erotic", if every picture with a Cupid is erotic – and in some sense, it is, in the broadest sense. Do we mean sexually explicit? Are all images of naked people "erotic"? That may say more about the modern viewer than the ancient intention. Do we mean more generally images that illustrate for modern viewers Roman attitudes and behaviors in sexual matters? And what about phallic charms, the fascinum? Are those even "erotic" in the sense we use that term, or are they apotropaic or fertility charms? The article does address this, but I'm not sure how many phalloi we need to make the point. The RS that discuss this topic will refer to certain works, and those are the ones that might best illustrate the article, if we have them at Commons. So it seems to me that the article should be illustrated just as we would an article on 19th-century American landscape painting or such – generally, with images discussed in the article or similar/relevant examples.
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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2022 and 12 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mipsallison, JNRM Student, IsaHistorical, Helenliska (article contribs).
