ABSTRACT
In classical Athens, there was a discursive trope, popular in comedy, but also found elsewhere, of making a place name into a verb, which then signified the idiosyncratic behaviors associated with the place. Many of these words had connotations of a distinctive sexual culture. These coinages come from Old Comedy, mostly Aristophanes, whose life spanned a tumultuous time in Athenian history. Intriguingly, many of these geographic associations have lived long and traveled far, even being translated into different languages. A consideration of place promises to complicate notions of the study of ancient sexuality by insisting that if there is a history of sexuality, there is also a geography of sexuality. If place and the social are crucially interdependent, it follows that gender and sexuality are also implicated in the construction of place. While geographers argue that place is operative in the construction of identity, it goes without saying that sex has long been understood to be radically constitutive of identity.
