Sometime around 100 AD, the Roman lawyer and aristocrat Pliny sent a letter to his third wife, Calpurnia – who was staying in a different part of Italy – to express how much he loved and missed her: I ...

As a classicist, I am often asked for Greek and Roman reflections on love for holidays and weddings. I usually admit at the outset that ancient ideas about love rarely match modern expectations. Take, ...

Tarquin and Lucretia (detail), by Titian. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Titian/Public domain Sex, said the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, ‘is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a ...

For ancient Romans, many of the gestures now associated with Valentine’s Day would be unfamiliar, if not completely puzzling. Love and desire were not confined to a single day, nor expressed through ...

A mix of ancient divinities, Aphrodite was patron over love, beauty, fertility, and war. But the venerated Greek deity has a more complex rise to fame than one might think. The birth of ...