ABSTRACT
Secondly, there are manifold problems of interpreting the evidence there is. Erotic and pornographic words and images are certainly important to any discussion of sexuality in a society. They illustrate, to an extent, the physical foci of fantasy and desire, and broader areas of the relationships between men, women and sexual expression. For instance, if one could demonstrate that the ancient and modern worlds consumed the explicitly erotic in the same way, that would challenge assumptions about the social construction of sexuality. But before this, there is a more fundamental difficulty of defining what was 'erotic' or 'pornographic' in the ancient world. Most writers have focussed on questions of content and intent to
defme pornography: that it is something which depicts sexual (not necessarily genital) acts with an intention to arouse the viewer. According to this argument, 'erotica' inhabits an unhappy limbo between 'art' and 'porn' as a sort of diluted pornography. More radical critics would argue that all representation is inherently pornographic, because it is primarily concerned with power relationships. Based on the idea of a powerful viewed and a powerless viewed, pornography perpetuates the subject/ object dichotomy. This defmition considerably extends the boundaries of pornography to include cultural products that objectify, and therefore Greek tragedies or Roman gladiatorial mosaics could be said to come within its purview.2
