Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Erotic Letters of Ancient Rome

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Long before phones allowed for sexting, how did the Ancient Romans exchange their illicit thoughts and desires? And what did a Roman dick pic look like?Joining Kate today to explore erotic letters from antiquity to the modern day is Owen Hodkinson, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Cultures at Leeds University.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely but twixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to about Twixter sheets. And in case you're a newbie, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, to other adults about adultery things in an adulty things, in an adulting way of coming a range of adults and bics,

and you should be an adult too. And if you're not all of those things, then cuck her off. We don't want you here, you're too sensitive, you're just going to spoil it for the rest of us. And for everyone else, right, on with the show. Betwixters, I will be with you in just a minute. Let me finish this letter. Forever yours, Miss Lister. Envelope closed, wax sealed drying, perfect. Handwritten letters are such a lost art, aren't they? And the erotic handwritten letter is an even greater lost art. At a time when

sexting a saucy tit-pick or a lazy you-up is all too easy. How did people in history exchange their deepest desires and share their wildest fantasies with each other, especially when you consider that literacy rates weren't exactly thriving. And yet it was done. And I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to find out all the filthy details, right after I have posted this letter. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes. Social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, there is. Hello, and welcome back to Petricks the History of Sex Scandal and Society. With me, Kate Lister.

The world of academia can be a stuffy and prudish place. Believe me, I have done the legwork. And that's in 2025. But imagine how historians and academics in the Victorian era reacted when they found smutty letters from ancient Rome. Oh, scandalous. It's safe to say it did not fit in with the lofty ideals of ancient Rome that they had.

What illicit ideas were shared in antiquity? Was there such a thing as a Roman dick pick? How were same sex desires expressed? And how did power dynamics play out in such correspondences? Well, taking us back through the evidence today is Owen Hodkinson, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Culture at Leeds University. Quills and papyruses at the ready betwixters, let's do this. Hello and welcome to betwixte.

Sheets, it's only Owen Hodkinson. How are you doing? Yeah, not too bad. Thank you. You're right? I'm doing okay. But we're here to talk about your research on erotic letters or love letters or both of them. So, Owen, how did you get into this research? Well, I basically was looking for something to do my PhD on in classics and I had done some work in my master's on, literature, Greek literature under the Roman Empire. I was looking for stuff that hadn't been really studied a great deal, and that's how I came upon a bunch of literary letters by these Greek authors at the 2nd and 3rd century AD, some of which were love letters, not all of them,

but I wrote my PhD about these letter collections and have been kind of working on them ever since. Would you make a distinction between love letters and erotic letters? Yes and no. So there's, I mean, they're all letters to do with Eros, the Greek god of love, and the Greek word eros that means love, but in a kind of sexual desire way rather than kind of platonic or familial love. So a love letter would be kind of under that categorisation as kind of romantic love,

but it also could just be purely about sex, could be pure filth. Some of the examples are, and they would all come under this kind of erotic letters, stroke love letters category. So as soon as somebody mentions a willie, it's erotic now. Yes, I think so.

That's not a very academic way of putting it, is it? When we think of love letters, erotic letters, I'm trying to imagine what an ancient Greek love letter would even have looked like. I mean, physically, would it have been on a scroll? Would it have been stone tablets? That would have been difficult to deliver to somebody. Yeah, so ancient kind of real letters written and sent in the ancient world by Greeks and Romans would have been mostly on papyrus or on wood tablets, so more easily transportable

and your kind of stone inscriptions. And are they vastly different from what we think of as love letters today? Is it still, well, I mean, how have they changed? Is it still, oh, you're amazing, you're brilliant, you lovely, da-da-da-da. Is it quite familiar when you're reading through it? Some of it is and some of it isn't. So I think there's certainly things that are recognisable. And some of that is due to the influence of these ancient letters

on modern kind of authors and love poets that have kind of influenced people educated in literature who then write love letters and want to kind of affect a nice kind of poetic or romantic style that would imitate this literature. So you get a lot of things going back to antiquity about, you know, romantic expressions of longing and separation and absence, which of course is what motivates a letter you write to someone because you're not in the same place as them. So a lot of ancient love letters and erotic letters are on about centrally kind of the idea of missing someone, longing for them, wanting to see them or worrying about them.

their absence and so on. But yeah, I mean, it's the whole ancient world context is very different in a lot of ways as well, in ways that I'm sure we're going to go into more. But there are letters that we would classify as kind of definitely under the heading of Eros, the god of sexual love, but we wouldn't call them love letters because they're between people of unequal status, so to an enslaved person or to someone who would be an underage person in today's world, but expressions of sexual desire towards those people who might not have any choice in the matter. Were these letters, or at least the ones you've been looking at, were they always supposed to be kept private? I'm thinking of something like St. Paul's letters to the Corinthians.

It was written to the Corinthians, but it's broader audience. Were these always supposed to be private? Yes. So the kind of the real examples that we have, there are plenty of literary examples which are imitating that kind of private correspondence, but they're kind of actually pieces of literature meant to be read by others. But the real examples that we have are intimate. And they refer to things such as the writer writing in their own hand and the recipient valuing that because in the ancient world people are going to use scribes.

Most people who have got the time and leisure to be writing about non-business transactional notes are going to use a scribe. But they valued, even if it's between the emperor or future emperor and his lover, as we've got some examples of writing in their own hand when it's this kind of intimate and private kind of correspondence. Could you imagine being a scribe who had to do that work, though? That would be like, imagine having to get a third person in to do your sexting for you. That's a hell of a job.

Yeah, definitely. So that's why they mostly kind of valued doing it in your own hand. But you mentioned sexting, and obviously that's a good comparison. I mentioned some of these we might not consider love letters, but are basically just kind of filthy propositions. Some of these are clearly much more like sexting than what we would call a love letter, but it all kind of comes under this heading of erotic letters. Is that because academia, as marvellous as it is and the amazing things that it has done,

has been ever so slightly squeamish about this kind of stuff, that they'd prefer to kind of call it a love letter instead of what it actually is? I think, yeah, that's certainly part of it. And also, I suppose there's just there's not a huge amount. when you consider how big a kind of form the love letter is in the modern world. So if you say what kinds of letter are there, well, letters of invitation, love letters, letters, of recommendation, love letters. But if you look at antiquity, there's hardly any.

So it kind of makes sense to group the kind of love letters and the kind of more sex letters, basically, under the same heading and study them. And of course, there are crossovers in the kinds of expression they use. And one letter could contain both. It could be romantic and refer to kind of physical expressions of that romantic love as well. So whose love letters, ancient sexting, erotic letters have you got? What sources are you working with here? So in terms of real letters, as I said, there's not really a great number surviving.

And so we have basically just a handful. I mean, literally you could count them on less than all 10 fingers, kind of surviving letters that you could classify as love letters or erotic letters from the first century AD until the kind of sixth century AD. So mostly these are letters on papyrus. Some of them are from a wife to a husband or vice versa, and some of them are between a master and an enslaved recipient and various other configurations, combinations of people.

It's interesting there that you said it would be an enslaved person who is the recipient of this, but maybe this is just my not understanding it, but I wouldn't have thought an enslaved person could have read that. Yes, so, I mean there's the example, the one, example I have in mind especially with that is there's a papyrus letter from the first century AD in Greek, which is basically a sexual proposition by two men to another man that includes a crude illustration as well of what they're propositioning him. I could read that one out if that would be. Please do. I think we need you to do that, yes. So it says Apion and

Epimus proclaimed to their best beloved Epaphroditos that if you allow us to bugger you, and if it's fine with you, we will not thrash you any longer if you allow us to buggy you farewell. And then the drawing is crude in both senses, as in it's so badly drawn that they've labelled it with obscene Greek words, meaning the bell-end and the arsehole, to kind of illustrate what they're propositioning. So the scholarly kind of consensus about this letter is that they're just kind of messing around, really. They're writing it to someone who they didn't need to write to because if they're in a position to kind of thrash him or have anal sex with him and those are the kind of, you know, I'll let you off the thrashing if you let us do this.

That's obviously not someone who's got an equal status and is in a position to say no, right? So the enslaved man there might not have any ability to read it. Some enslaved people, of course, could read because sometimes scribes were and some of them were tutors. So it could have been someone who could have read it, but also there's no need for them to write this letter if they're threatening these things, presumably. maybe they're going to carry it out in person and they can just get on and do it. So it's more for their own kind of, they're imitating the kinds of formal approach of a love letter or erotic letter by having this kind of farewell and they proclaim to their best beloved Apaphroditus. But within

that, it's just a threat of sexual assault basically as an alternative to a different form of assault. And there's two authors. Or at least there's two people addressing Aphroditus. Yes. I've never had a sex or a love letter or a threat or anything else. from two people before. Who on earth would... I know, I know we'll never know. But who do you think they were? Masters in a household, brothers?

Like what? Yes. I mean, it seems most likely that they would obviously be free members of the household. So they could be two brothers or other relations, free men of the household. And the other must be an enslaved person of the household, which could range from, you know,

it's a fairly high status one, a tutor or a scribe, down to a much lower one. probably lower is likely in this situation because of the way that they're proposing to treat him. It's nuts, isn't it, that somebody wrote that down thousands of years ago, and that's what survived. Yeah. Now, it's the subject of intense academic study, just this throwaway, presumably it was a throwaway piece of writing. They weren't intending it to be one for the ages. Yes, exactly. And the only reason we have a few letters like this is precisely because of

the kind of rubbish dumps of oxyrincus and other places. in Egypt, so the heat of and the dry conditions preserved a lot of our papyri from the ancient world. So we have letters from there and not very many from other places. That's why we have much more kind of literary letters that imitate these things rather than these real examples. I'll be back with Owen after the short break. I suppose with things like this is well, like trying to understand what the context of it is, is incredibly difficult.

I went to Pompeii recently and like looking at all the graffiti on the walls. Some of it is written to other people. Some of it is kind of in this vein of threats and things. But then some of it, you're looking at it, like, it would say, like, Julie Arniss's ass can be bought for two donkeys or something mad like, and you're thinking, that might be the Roman equivalent of, like, writing your friend's phone number in the toilet booth and putting get it here on it because you think it's really funny.

Yes, definitely. Some of these things can be. And that letter that I read out is clearly kind of distasteful as it is to as modern audiences, but it is playful. It's kind of a game to them. But, yeah, so, of course, course, some of those things in Pompeii and other Roman cities that would have been like it, would have been kind of advertising services in a brothel, of course. So we have kind of ancient

letters that are literary exercises, but purporting to be from courtesans of the ancient world to and from their lovers as well, or lovers stroke clients. So if we're thinking about love letters, like what you think. So I'm thinking Ovid. He's the sort of the great, well, maybe he's not the great romantic writer. How is, tell us a bit about who Ovid was and how he was understood at the time. So, yeah, Ovid, first century BC, first century AD, Roman poet. He's kind of fairly mainstream now, and he wrote across a variety of poetic genres. So some of them will love poems. But in terms of what we're talking about today, the letters that he wrote, the most famous collection of letters are called the heroides, they're letters from heroines. So these are

purely kind of fictional and mythologically set letters from the heroines of ancient Greek myth to the men who abandoned them. So the first letter is from Penelope to Odysseus or to Ulysses, the Roman version of his name. There's a letter from Medea to Jason and so on. So there are letters, and they're all predicated on this idea of absence and separation, which is why you write a letter.

So, you know, he's chosen situations from mythology where a Greek hero has abandoned a lover or a wife gone off with someone else and imagining, you know, this is the love letter that they would have written. But as so often, because letters are about absence and not sent to someone you're with, they're kind of unrequited love letters and they're kind of bemoaning their fate,

having been abandoned. Some of them are suicidal, talking about how they're going to kill themselves because they can't have the man who's abandoned them, and most of them are tearful. He's not threatening to bugger anybody, though, is he? I mean, but he does get quite sourced as Ovid. Yes, he does at times, but more so in his other love poetry than in these letters. because the letters that he writes are. So he has other collections called the amorees, the love poems,

and a collection of kind of didactic poetry. So we've got instruction about how to court and so on, both from the male and female perspective. So there you get some kind of physical advice and physical suggestiveness and so on. Within the love letters, because they're supposed to be from great ladies, you know, kind of queens and princesses and Penelope,

as a royal woman of kind of noble, even kind of semi-divine birth, You're talking about much more delicate expressions. And it's also kind of writing about it's over now or is there any chance that he'll come back to me. But it's kind of beneath their dignity to be mentioning the sexual side of things. They wouldn't be scribbling bell-ends on their love letters, would they? No, no. Interestingly, what they do and what he does to kind of play around with this kind of physical manifestation of the letter

that's more than just the text itself is he has. as these women talk about the tears that they're shedding, smudging the lines of the ink that they're writing. So on several occasions, you have examples of whatever blocks you shall see, my tears have made, but tears too have nonetheless with the weight of words. So it's kind of, you know, you might not be able to read this properly. That's because I'm all emotional and I'm crying. It's smudging the ink.

But you should read into the tears what I feel and take that as well. And in one of these cases as well, you've got blocks that are caused by a woman's blood. She says, my right hand holds a pen, my left a naked sword and the papers lying loosely in my lap. So she's in the act of committing suicide while she's writing this letter and the blood drops are smudging the letter. That reminds me randomly of Lady Caroline Lamb right into Byron and sending him clumps of her pubic hair that she said were also covered in blood. Nice, Carolyn. Thank you very much for that. But maybe there was a classical influence there. I think so. I mean, on the romantic poets, I mean, of course, well, anyone up until the early 20th century who's kind of in the educated elites able to write literature and poetry and so on in Europe has read classical Greek and Latin, you know, are versed in both those languages and reading these literature and also reading translations of them. So clearly there's influences and continuities between these kind of forms of expression as well, where you get, you know, references to tears, references to kisses and these kind of literature.

games with the idea that the, you know, that the text is illegible because of my tears and so on. That could sometimes be an affectation or a literary game rather than a reality like it is for Ovid's heroities. It's a good move that one. I'm going to store that away and make a little mental note. It doesn't work with texts, though. You can't say my text is all. You do have to revert to snail mail to make it work. That's the only thing.

Yeah, good point. But how, let's think about how influential Ovid was. because today he's one of the giants of ancient classical literature. Was he at the time, and how long did it take for him to kind of garner that reputation? Yeah, so, I mean, it was quite slow, really. I mean, he wasn't regarded the most highly by kind of classical scholars, and they're essentially, you know, the gatekeeper to kind of decide what gets translated, what gets published in an edition, and what gets kind of studied and brought, therefore,

before a wider audience. So especially these love letters, they were seen as having been written early in his career as being minor works. And because they're on the theme of love and the kind of high, yeah, the high-minded classical scholars are interested in, you know, great works of literature about the Roman Empire and kings and emperors. And, you know, so Virgil's aneer and Horace's odes on kind of weighty themes and meditations about the nature of human life and so on. And this kind of romantic stuff really wasn't studied a huge amount, even in comparison with some of Ovid's other works, which themselves were kind of relegated below people like Virgil. When does he start to be rediscovered? Or like an interesting romance in general, I'm thinking, because if you think of some of the, like, you know, the Aeneer and Homer's work, there is romance in there. There's definitely romantic stuff going on. But it's not like the films today where that's absolutely central. almost like a side quest. They're interested in military stuff, heroism and, you know, the great glory. Yeah. So, I mean, there are genres from antiquity like comedy that focus on love and from

those that kind of what leads to our kind of rom-com and kind of romantic novel genres ultimately. But they, again, because of that kind of love story being the central plot, like the ancient novel as well, are kind of disregarded or overlooked by most scholars. I mean, obviously, He gets a first translation into English in 1567, George Turbaville's translation called Ovid's Heroical Epistles. So, you know, they're becoming accessible to ordinary people then, but still there's still some kind of prejudice on the kind of gatekeepers, the scholars who decide what gets the most attention and kind of interpretation and so on. So when these letters, the kind of the ones that you're working on, when they were rediscovered, was that by. the Georgians and the Victorians, because I love the fact that when they started to actually find this material and discover it, it really upset their notion of what the ancient Greeks and

Romans were like. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, so for most people, until you start having translations, of course, you can only access it if you can read the original Greek and Latin of these texts. And up till the Victorian era and beyond to the mid-20th century, really, what gets chosen for, you know, a penguin classics treatment or the sort of earlier equivalence is the stuff that's deemed acceptable for abroad, you know, sort of modern society and modern sort of popular mores. So the classicists themselves are going to be aware of all the kind of pederastic stuff and the references to buggery and the violent stuff, but they're not translating that. You know, you get editions and translations published that omit some of the kind of more

racy and more explicit material. So really, it's only kind of if you're in the know and someone tells you secretly go and look in these books in the library, and you can only read them in the original Greek or Latin. There's no translations available that you kind of discover about these things. We should talk about the pederasty thing because it, I mean, even today, it can disrupt our estimation of the ancient world. There is a sense of like, oh, fuck, when you find it like, why did you have to do that? But can you try and explain a little bit about what that was, what was going on?

Yeah. So, I mean, in summary, classical Athenian society, which is where we have most of our evidence from the ancient world, so that's kind of fifth, fourth century BC. Athens not only kind of thinks it's okay, but thinks it's a great thing among a kind of aristocratic society to have these pederastic relations. Plato writes a lot about it and kind of valorizes it. In his case, he's kind of valorizing a chaste version of it in which it's just kind of instruction by the older male to the younger male. But it's clear that that's not all that's going on in reality. And the Romans take that up. And it becomes a big part of the literary tradition. And one kind of main theory that people put forward about all of this is that in societies where marriages are basically arranged most of the time, women aren't kind of coming and going and meeting people, there's no need for kind of romantic seduction, erotic persuasion.

So if you like the chase, then you're kind of going in for expressions like that to a beloved youth rather than a woman who you would just, you know, you would just speak to her parents and get married to her. There would be no kind of erotic persuasion going on. And that's not, you know, I don't want to erase, of course, the fact that there were, would have been people in antiquity who we would call today homosexual. They would have same-sex desire.

But this is a different phenomenon. This is a phenomenon where it's kind of socially sanctioned for an older man to go with a youth. And the age range would vary from what we would definitely call off limits and underage today, up to people who would be within age. limits in some, you know, within the age of consent in some modern societies for same-sex relations. When we're thinking about same-sex relations in general, and I'm being very

reductive and crude here, but you sort of get this sense of like the perterastic relationships are okay because the way they're understanding it is between dominant and submissive. And if you've got a young man, he's like a proxy woman standing in for that and he's the submissive one. But as soon as they get to be older, then you run in the risk of its two active men together and now, oh, that doesn't work anymore. How did they understand adult same-sex relationships? Was that okay as well? No, that was basically frowned upon. That's not normalized at all in the same way that these pederastic ones were. So really, the only thing that's kind of falls within these norms that we would consider consenting adults at same-sex relationship is if the younger

partner in a kind of pederastic model would be towards the sort of upper-age, you know, would be a kind of teenage post-pubescent. You know, some of the literature would include that kind of thing and some of it would rule it out as them already being passed their prime. It's fascinating to me of like, what is the cutoff point of this? Was there an age? Was there a birthday? What was this? Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to pin this down because, you know,

there's not a lot of reference to specifically ages. I mean, there are references. So a lot of the literature of this kind does reference kind of the first facial hair growing and therefore signs of pubescence. and sort of first kind of hair growing anywhere else other than on the head as a sign that you're coming to the end of your eligibility to be the younger partner and starting to be eligible to be a full man, a full kind of adult male, the older partner. But we do get exceptions to that. So some of my Greek love letters by Philostratus talk about beards in this conventional way and say that's kind of ruling you out. But some of them kind of address a youth but say, you know, I don't mind the fact that you're starting to grow your.

beard and it's handsome and so on. So you can encompass within the same literary erotic tradition, something that's not pederastic really, but it's using the same kind of literary tropes and the same language and so on. Marcus Aurelius was writing love letters to another man when he was 18, wasn't he? That's right, yeah. Yeah, so Marcus Aurelius, who would be the emperor later, but isn't at this stage. He's the one that's famous from the first gladiator film, of course. Oh, they left that out, didn't know. Yes. He's writing to his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto. That relationship is in the second century AD. It began when Marcus Aurelius was 18 and Fronto was around 39. So really Marcus Aurelius is already at 18 kind of older than you would normally consider this kind of model for pederastic

relationships and antiquity. But it's clearly in this mold. One is the tutor and the much older man and is in a position of authority and an instruction. And he's learning everything from him about, including how to write about love. And so some of their letters are very, well, all of their letters, both in Latin and Greek, are very kind of literary. But there's a bunch of Greek ones that weren't rediscovered until the 19th century, which are all about their erotic relationship. And when they were rediscovered, the same with what we were talking about earlier with the Victorians and censorship.

They were swept under the carpet. They weren't kind of published instantly in a penguin classics kind of equivalent of the day and trumpeted abroad. you know, people didn't really know about them, hardly any, you know, even hardly any classicists knew about them until the last few decades. So, yeah, they're full of kind of these the same literary languages of longing and burning with love, these kind of literary cliches that go into modern love letters

and modern erotic poetry and so on as well. But are with this kind of age gap and this instruction aspect of it. So, you know, he's an instructor in rhetoric and grammar and so on and literature writing to him about plaiters. toast text that I referenced before that are about these pederastic relationships in the classical era. Any news on the lesbians at all? Do we have any letters from lesbians left to us? I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there. As so often, and especially in the ancient world, there is very little reference to same-sex desire between women. What there is doesn't come under

love letters or erotic letters. So even the only kind of nod towards lesbianism that I can give you on this theme is there's a letter from Sappho to her former lover, Faun, among these Ovid Herodies letters that, as I said, they're mostly mythological women, but this is the one exception. It's a real woman, and he's chosen her because she's the famous love poet, of course. But this is a letter to a male person who's been her lover before, not a woman, and doing all of the same things that these heroines are doing, these mythological women, crying about their finished love or their unrequited love and so on. I'll be back with Owen after the short break.

It's amazing how little surviving evidence there is of Sappho at all, considering how big her name is and how influential she's gone on to be, that there's just tiny fragments of bits and pieces left. Absolutely, yeah. And the reason we kind of hold her name up so much more than the surviving remnants would suggest we might is because of these later poets like Ovid and so on, kind of using her name, looking up to her, imitating her, you know, Catullus wrote poetry

that's directly translated from and then sort of building from her poems a Latin poet of the first century BC so the ancients have access in the imperial era to much more of her poetry than we do and they're kind of building it in and building up that reputation

but we sadly don't have very much at all that must be so frustrating for you as a scholar to be reading all these ancient texts by men going oh that one by Sappho was amazing that was so good but I'm not actually going to tell you what it was or reproduced it, I'm just going to tell you that it was dead good

deeply frustrating. So if we're talking about the style of love letters, and they are sounding quite familiar, you know, dodgy, pederastic stuff aside, but this kind of, I love you, I burn for you, I long for you, does that change as we're going through time? Or does that kind of remain fairly consistent? I'm trying to think what a Renaissance love letter would be.

Yeah, so it seems to remain fairly stable. I mean, one kind of change that we do start to see, is when the Roman Empire converts to Christianity and Christianity becomes the official religion, of course, that does change the literary culture and therefore the writing culture in general. But even there, so we've got an example of a real letter from the 6th century AD where, you know,

in this Christian context where they're still referencing Eros, Cesaros and Aphrodite and so on in these terms of burning with desire, etc. But into the Renaissance, I mean, these letters are still having an impact and influencing. So we've got, yeah, so I mean, the Greek letters by Philostratus that I mentioned, some have argued that a few of those were inspiring some of Shakespeare's sonnets, and he, of course, wrote some that are to a young man that he's supposed to have been intimate with.

There's no one's really made a cast iron case for that connection yet, but there's still work to be done there. But we know that his contemporary, the English poet Ben Johnson, did some poems, wrote some poems that are translations of some of these philosophies. in love letters that they're not letters anymore because he's translating his prose letters into English verse. So they're love poems and they don't pretend to be letters. They don't start off with a dear so and so or end up with a farewell. In this kind of period, we get real letters that use these kind of tropes. So this idea of the tears that Ovid has made famous and translations

and circulations of his text in Latin from the 1500s, as we've seen it onwards, are clearly having influence. So we've got a great example of a letter that Mozart wrote to his wife, Constanza, in October 1790, where he starts off with the usual kind of longing and separation. If only I had a letter from you, everything would be a right. So a letter is trying to bridge the gap and that absence. The letter itself compensates in some way for not being with the person who's sending it. And you get all of these kind of contemporary examples where the person's own handwriting as again being privileged and intimate, same as in antiquity. But the kind of the particular literary trope that goes all the way back to at least

of it is in his post script to this letter where he says, P.S. While I was writing the last page, tier after tear fell on the paper. So you've got the exact same device of the ink being kind of affected by the tears while writing. And then he would wreck everything, wouldn't he, by talking about how often he'd been farting that day? If I remember my Mozart letters correctly. Yes, he is quite playful. I mean, that postscript carries on, but I must cheer up.

Catch an astonishing number of kisses are flying about. So he's kind of blowing kisses to her through the letter and imagining her sort of catching them out of the air. I love Mozart's letters. They're absolutely bonkers. I think my absolute most favourite love letters, very erotic letters, the ones James Joyce sent to his wife. Have you read those ones?

Yes, I'm familiar with those. They're absolutely filthy, aren't they? Yes, and those kind of examples are actually filthier than almost everything that we find from antiquity in letter form. I'm not saying there isn't filthy erotic poetry as old from antiquity. But yeah, that kind of explicit stuff is not really much there in these ancient letters apart from that first example I quoted. And if anyone's listening, go and look at those letters up. But we should talk about somewhere where these letters did have a direct influence. And that's on none other than Oscar Wilde and Victorian society.

because he frequently evoked classical antiquity and mythology. And even when he was on trial, he's evoking it, isn't he? Yes. I mean, you know, he uses that as part of the defense of homosexual love. Of course, in the trial, the fact that it has these noble precedents and, you know, all the Victorians are fine with the Greeks and Romans and put them on a pedestal to other aspects as to other aspects of their culture. But suddenly, if you engage in any same-sex shenanigans,

then that's beyond the pale and the Greeks and Romans have nothing to teach us anymore. So it's this kind of double standard that he's alluding to. So yeah, I mean, it's very interesting that Oscar Wilde, again, his circle, not he himself as a writer, but people that he knows are kind of publishing in a magazine that he founded, for example, for a kind of private circulation,

kind of subscription magazine, are writing English first translations of these letters of Philostratus, who, again, is a minor name in, of studies of classical antiquity, but he keeps on coming up in these odd places. So there's a guy we don't know almost anything about called Percy Lancelot Osborne, who wrote several versions of Philostratus's love letter,

some that were addressed to youths or to male youths in the original. And he turns some of them interestingly into heterosexual love poems, but some of them he keeps as same-sex ones. So, you know, Wild and co-are are obviously aware of these really unstudied. and at that stage never been translated into English texts,

which, as I said, you have to go and seek them out in the library and read them in the original if you want to know about these same-sex expressions of desire. Love letters can be quite dangerous things, can't they? I mean, one of the best advice that you can give to young people today is never, ever, ever put your face in the photos. Just don't do it ever. It's a bad move. But all throughout history, you do find examples of people being blackmailed

by a former lover who's got their letters. I think that happened to Oscar Wilde actually. There's some reference to, yeah, wouldn't you just love to know what he was writing to people? Yes, definitely. But yeah, exactly. I mean, they are, I mean, we didn't have, they didn't have the problems of having your face in the photo back then, of course. But, you know, it can be very incriminating when you find love letters, erotic correspondence between same-sex couples. Or in cases of adultery, even within heterosexual ones, of course, you know, could be uncovered and could be used to blackmail or to bring someone down, as happened with Wild.

It's funny that we've never learned that lesson. All throughout human history, we've been quite content to write down the most explicit and filth and actually write the evidence that it's happening in front of us. Yes, well, I guess it's that it's that notion of privacy, isn't it? I mean, you kind of assume when you're writing it that it's not going to be uncovered. But, you know, someone... And studied by academics hundreds of years into the future. So as a final question then, what do you think makes for a good love letter? is somebody that studied erotic love letters and romantic verse from the ancient world,

can you look at them and go, that's a good love letter? Or do you just kind of let them wash over you? Have they influenced you at all in your love letters? I don't remember ever actually writing a little. Maybe I was a teenager. Scribling. And yeah, they're not very useful for kind of texts, as we said, for various reasons. But yes, I mean, in terms of the kind of things that stand out,

it is those kind of expressions of missing and longing. and burning with desire and so on that kind of resonate through all the ancient and modern imitators. It's very intense, isn't it? Just get this feeling that perhaps the intensity is wavered slightly in our modern era because if you got a love letter, first of all, an actual letter, that would be quite alarming, I think, to get a letter through the post nowadays. But even if you're expecting it to open it up and to be like, I burn for you, I love you,

I can't read, my tears are staining the ink. You might have a restraining order. I don't know if we've lost something here. I think we probably have, yes. And I suppose, you know, these things are there in kind of romantic cliches, you know, the same as, you know, someone in a rom-com turning up with musical instrument and serenading you outside your window. You know, the kind of song and the poem are the place where you can express those things intensely.

But even then, you know, kind of one man's romantic serenader is another is the woman's stalker or someone that she needs to put her as training order. again sometimes. So yeah, it's very much a matter of perspective there. Oh, you have been wonderful to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? To write you romantic verses. Don't do that, anybody. Leave Owen alone. So yeah, if you search for my name, there aren't many Owen Hodkinson's University of Leeds will find me. And there's, if you put love letters in that search as well, you will find all sorts of information about the book about the project and the project as a whole.

Should we give it the full title once more? Love letters and erotic letters, antiquity and beyond. You have been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Owen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along

wherever it is that you'd get your podcasts. You could even write us an erotic letter. And if you wanted to do that, then you can email it to us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Coming up, we've got episodes on dinosaur sex and Lilith, all coming your way. Don't say we never give you anything. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy

and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.