Dee Salmon

But I think what is interesting about this and what historians have noted is that this really suggests that even in a structured royal marriage, there is, like, room for this, like, romantic sexual desire.

And it's quite beautiful as well as, like, horny jail for sure.

Like, it goes on to sort of say about, like, the beauty and, like, the text of, like, I'm trembling before you.

Like, that's, like, lover boy, lover girl shit.

It's giving heated rivalry.

Yeah.

And I think one of the lines in the poem is something about like, I'll be discreet, like I'm not going to tell anyone that I saw this, right?

And it's sort of like that's why historians have been like, oh, is this like a queer relationship?

Like these women were in love with each other because the poem is like, don't worry, your secret's safe with me kind of thing.

And it's so fascinating because obviously a lot of what we're going to talk about today is pretty heterosexual.

But there's a lot of stories, cultural myths and like even recorded poems like this that definitely hint at a lot of homosexual relationships.

Yes.

Yeah, which obviously like shows you that these early ideas of romantic love and love in general are so powerful and they impact culture forever.

centuries and thousands and thousands of years you know like also concepts like eros which was like passionate desire agape or agape i don't know how to pronounce that um which is selfless love these are all the things that plato talked about in symposium and yeah it was a chaotic way of viewing love also the romans were kind of chaotic as well they definitely had more of an emphasis on like civic duty and their marriages were very much about like property and inheritance and

But there were some examples that we found that showed that the Romans obviously had like a soft spot and they were kind of like, okay, evidence of romantic love here.

The thing that we found talking about this romantic love was a book called Ars Amatoria, which directly translates to The Art of Love.

And it was written by a Roman poet called Ovid.

So this was like a very tongue-in-cheek kind of guide to the Romans on how to like –

get a woman and how to keep her, like romancing her, seducing her, and then, yeah, like basically making her your baddie.

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