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Metropolitan Museum of Art

LOVE AND PSYCHE

by Rodin

Philadelphia Museum of Art

THE ABDUCTOR

by Rodin

Philodemus of Gadara, who flourished in the first century B.C., was a Greek poet who settled in Rome. He became an intimate of powerful political forces, and also gathered around him a coterie of Romans interested in philosophy and literature. Among other works, mostly of a philosophical nature, Philodemus produced erotic pieces marked by extreme lewdness. Some twenty-five of these epigrams are still extant, collected in the corpus known as the Anthologia Palatina. These poems became popular in Rome and were imitated by both Horace and Ovid.

As an erotic stimulus, Greek women wore diaphanous thin-spun robes made of silk from the island of Cos. In Rome, similarly, prostitutes sometimes wore a toga vitrea—a glassy or transparent toga. There were, too, vestes sericae—silk dresses, in feminine use.

All such robes, of course, were of a purposely revealing and tantalizing nature, acting upon the viewer in a marked amatory direction. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, makes blunt and condemnatory remarks on the custom.