Sandra Boehringer (Strasbourg)
Sandra Boehringer is a historian and philologist at the University of Strasbourg. Her work focuses on archaic Greek poetry and the construction of sexual categories in antiquity, with particular reference to the thought of Michel Foucault. She is the author of Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (Routledge, 2021, originally published in French by Les Belles Lettres, 2007) and has coedited several scholarly collections including Après Les Aveux de la chair. Généalogie du sujet chez Michel Foucault (2020, with Laurie Laufer) and Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity (Routledge, 2022, with Daniele Lorenzini). For several years she ran a seminar at the EHESS (Paris, Centre Gernet), with Claude Calame, on the way in which anthropological comparison with distant worlds enables us to perceive the processes at work and to think about today's world. She recently published La sexualité antique, une histoire moderne (Epel, 2025).
Sex, Pleasure, and Theory: What Do Aphrodisia Really Stand For?
Aphrodite is the only Olympian deity whose domain of intervention is explicitly designated by her name, as noted by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge. This invites us to consider aphrodisia within the norms and practices of a distant, polytheistic society.
First, we will demonstrate how the expression ta aphrodisia encompasses a much broader semantic field than simply "sexual pleasures"—from preclassical poetry to the Greek physicians of Late Antiquity, from classical philosophers to imperial-era inscriptions.
Michel Foucault was drawn to the convergence of the notions of desire and pleasure, rendering aphrodisia a semi-empirical category in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. We will thus assess, in light of classicists’ reception of The History of Sexuality, the risks and misunderstandings that may have arisen from the use of this term, while also highlighting its significance for our understanding of a society "before sexuality" (Halperin).
Jean-Christophe Courtil (Toulouse)
Jean-Christophe Courtil is an Associate Professor of Latin language, literature, and civilization at Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France, where he leads the project The Ancient Origins of Western Sexology. A philologist and historian specializing in Hellenistic philosophy and medicine, his research focuses on Seneca, Stoicism, Latin medical texts and ancient dietetics, with a particular interest in the connections between medical thought and sexuality. He is soon to publish a monograph on this subject: Venus et medicina. Sexe, maladie et santé dans les textes médicaux latins, de Celse à Cassius Felix.
Venereal Diseases in Antiquity? New Perspectives
The term venereal disease, used to describe ailments caused by sexual transmission, is relatively recent, as it does not appear before the 17th century. In ancient texts, no equivalent expression exists, and the concept itself is never explicitly formulated. But does the absence of the term necessarily imply the absence of the idea?
Latin medical authors describe conditions that seem to align with what we now call sexually transmitted infections (STIs), yet they did not recognize sexual contact as the mode of transmission. However, some non-medical authors appear to have perceived a connection between sexual intercourse and the spread of certain diseases.
How can we explain why ancient physicians overlooked a pathological phenomenon that laypeople seemed to understand? In reality, the notion of sexual contagion in antiquity was shaped more by satirical or moral discourse than by scientific observation. Lacking knowledge of pathogenic agents, physicians could not conceptualize sexual activity in terms of infection. Nevertheless, their writings do reflect a form of venereal disease in a pre-infectious sense—where sexual activity is not seen as a microbial vector but rather as a triggering factor of bodily disorders.
Gabriel Alexandre Fernandes Da Silva (Lisbon)
Gabriel Silva is an Invited Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. His research interests include Latin poetry (epic and elegy), ancient medicine, and the intersections between medical and non-medical texts. He is currently co-editing a volume entitled The Words of Medicine: Technical Terminology in Material and Textual Evidence from the Greco-Roman World (with Isabella Bonatti) for De Gruyter, and another volume entitled Pliny the Elder from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance: The Naturalis Historia and its Impact on Medicine (with Paolo Garofalo and Giorgio Ferri) for Palgrave Macmillan.
Animals and Sexuality in Pliny and the Plinian Tradition
Pliny the Elder stands out as an important source on a wide range of topics, particularly animal-based medicine. Books 28–32 of the Naturalis historia deal with animal medicine, and Pliny devotes a considerable number of chapters to gynecological subjects. The Roman author provides a list of miracles produced by the female body (Nat. 28.70–86) and a list of animal remedies for treating women's ailments. From this second list of remedies, Pliny groups a wide range of animals (including hare, bull, and hyena) that have medical properties that are helpful (or dangerous) to women in many ways, from menstruation to pregnancy. However, Pliny’s text vacillates between what would be considered proper medical care and popular superstition about the properties of animals.
In this presentation, my main aim is to present and analyse the animal remedies and properties mentioned by Pliny, to contextualise them within the text of the Naturalis historia, and to examine the use of Pliny’s animal medicine and its tradition within ancient medicine, especially regarding sexuality.
Antoine Pietrobelli (Université de Franche-Comté)
Antoine Pietrobelli is a professor of Greek language, literature, and civilization at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University of Besançon and a member of ISTA (UR 4011). A philologist and historian of medicine, his research focuses primarily on Galen and the dissemination of Galenism from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He published a critical edition of the first book of Galen's Commentary on Hippocrates' Regimen of Acute Diseases in the CUF in 2019 and also edited the collective works Contre Galien (2020) and De Bagdad à Constantinople: le transfert des savoirs médicaux (XIe–XIVe s.) (2023).
Galen and Aphrodisia
In Volume II of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault notes that "the elements of the regime of aphrodisia are largely silent regarding the forms that the acts themselves may take". While this observation is generally verifiable, we find in the writings of the physician Rufus of Ephesus remarks indicating that intercourse with a woman is less violent than with a man or that its practice in a standing position is more exhausting. Galen himself states that fellatio is less repugnant than cunnilingus. He also refers to the touches administered by a midwife to a widow suffering from hysteria, as well as the hygienic masturbation practiced by the philosopher Diogenes. In the two chapters dedicated to Galen in The Care of the Self, Foucault describes Galenic physiology of aphrodisia and highlights the ambivalence of his discourse concerning sexual acts, which are considered both natural and beneficial for health, while also at times perilous. This presentation aims to revisit the moral, physiological, and therapeutic conceptions of aphrodisia in Galen's work to better understand the ambiguities of the physician-philosopher.