ABSTRACT
In Rome, as in Greece, the division of individuals into two groups according to the criterion of biological sex was only relevant within a limited sector of the social body. Roman masculinity was, first and foremost, a social masculinity, as Williams, Gleason, Mesli, and Dupont and Eloi have all in different ways demonstrated. Surprisingly enough, the figure of Sappho occasions one of the first Roman mentions of sexual relations between women, at the very end of the first century bce—even though Classical period Greece had been silent about the content of her poetry. With Ovid, the theme became a source for mythological fiction, and toward the start of the first century ce, the term tribas appeared, while an explicitly derogatory discourse on the subject began to emerge, via caricature and satire. The story of Leukippos, from which Ovid draws, is thus a myth connected to themes of bisexuation and sex change, as well as with the passage to adulthood.
