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Greek and Roman Erotica
David Mountfield
A compact, generously illustrated survey of erotic imagery from the ancient Greek and Roman world, written by David Mountfield and issued by Crescent Books. Vase paintings, frescoes, sculpture, and small ornaments—much of it from major museums and sites like Pompeii—are reproduced in color and black-and-white, framed by short passages from classical erotic literature. The tone is popular rather than scholarly: the pictures carry the book, with only brief connective text. For the ancients, sexual imagery ranged across the sacred, the comic, and the apotropaic, and even a light treatment like this hints at how differently antiquity handled such material. Best understood as an accessible visual introduction for the general reader, it's a browsable gateway to a subject that serious scholars have since examined with far more nuance.
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The author
David Mountfield was a prolific British author of illustrated popular histories on subjects from piracy to folk art. He writes as a knowledgeable generalist assembling and captioning material for a wide readership rather than as a classicist advancing new arguments.
The book
Greek and Roman Erotica, published by Crescent Books, gathers roughly ninety pages of reproductions—pottery, statuary, wall painting, and decorative objects—interleaved with brief excerpts from ancient erotic writing. The images are drawn from museums and archaeological sites, with Pompeii and Greek vase painting prominent.
How to read it
This is a coffee-table survey, not a critical study; the commentary is thin and the framing dated. Read it for the objects, then turn to scholars such as Catherine Johns (Sex or Symbol?) for the context—what these images meant, and why 'erotica' is a slippery modern label for ancient art that mixed the sacred, protective, and playful.
For more context
The rediscovery of explicit Roman art at Pompeii and Herculaneum shaped centuries of debate about ancient sexuality, much of it long hidden in museum 'secret cabinets.'
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- David Mountfield
- Publisher
- Crescent Books
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1982
- ISBN
- 0-517-390272
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine