Today, We’re Hung Up About Love and Sex. Turns Out So Were Our Ancestors
by Robert Garland February 12, 2026 (zocalopublicsquare.org)
Were ancient people as hung up about love and sex as we tend to be? Was guilt something they had to deal with? Or embarrassment? Or low desire?
There are few subjects more central to the human condition than physical and emotional intimacy. Much is lost to us about what ancient people got up to behind proverbial closed doors. But the little we do know suggests a timelessness to our spectrum of appetites and impulses.
Modern human behavior is not as original as we might like to think. We were not, for instance, even the first species to kiss: Scientists believe that the earliest smooch took place about 21.5 million years ago, when two large apes decided to give it a try. They must have enjoyed it, because they’ve been at it ever since. Polar bears, albatrosses, and other creatures followed suit. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens picked up the habit a few million years down the evolutionary line, swapping saliva and trading oral microbes.
Likewise, the polyamory of Brooklyn couples pales in comparison to historical couplings. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are polygynandrous, which means that males and females mate with multiple partners. Quite likely our ancestors were polygynandrous, too, before deciding—for the most part—that pair bonding was the way to go.
As for the specifics of human desire, surviving documentation offers us only a selective story. Almost all authors in the ancient world were freeborn males; it’s virtually impossible to access the perspectives of women and enslaved people about their sex lives. In the records that do exist, we learn little about care and commitment or even marital love. No husband says, “I love you” to his wife in the Bible. In funerary inscriptions, Roman husbands extol their deceased wives for their fidelity, industriousness, and obedience; we rarely learn anything personal.
Our understanding of relationships of the distant past is further complicated by the inexactitude of translation. When the Lydian king Candaules uses the word eramai to describe his feelings for his wife in the 7th century B.C.E., it’s not clear whether he’s saying he loves her, he’s infatuated with her, or he lusts after her. The Hebrew Bible uses the verb “know,” ladat, for sexual intercourse, but invariably the man is the subject. What does that tell us about gender dynamics?
Future historians researching love in the 21st century will find a wealth of private correspondence detailing intimacy. Nothing equivalent survives from the ancient world. Egypt has bequeathed exquisite love poetry such as this declaration by a girl to her beloved—“I will be with you every day, setting food before you like a maidservant does before her master”—but it was almost certainly written by a professional scribe. The Old Testament’s Song of Songs speaks of the yearning passion between a boy and a girl—“You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters,” he declares—but again, this is a poetic construct.
Still, we can infer some things about ancient relationships. Sumerian, Egyptian, and Etruscan sculptures depict loving couples warmly embracing. The 1st-century C.E. Greek moralist Plutarch urged couples to express their feelings openly toward each other, “so that just as rope gains strength by entwining the strands, so their communication is strengthened by mutual goodwill.”
The phenomenon of unrequited love, which features prominently in modern-day magazine columns and internet musings, was also very common in the ancient world. The 6th- and 7th-century C.E. Greek poet Sappho never wrote about an emotional or physical relationship, but she was forever yearning for some young woman or another. In their writings, Roman elegists Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid also seemed to be most excited by the ultimate endless futility of their pursuit of a girl always just out of their reach.
Just as we might seek out a self-help book or a podcast in search of support in the love department, so the ancients had their own literature to turn to when they felt anxious or ignorant. Ovid, for instance, advertised himself as “the professor of love” at the opening of The Art of Love, which explores how to pick up girls. The best known sex manual, the Sanskrit Kama Sutra, recommends ways of kissing, embracing, slapping, scratching, and biting—which it extols as highly stimulating.
For the truly desperate, love spells—like those you might acquire from an Etsy witch today—were also an option.
Animal activists would obviously be outraged by the ingredient list of many of the multitude of incantations, magic spells, and curses that existed. One spell found in the Greek Magical Papyri for winning the heart of someone who’s been ignoring you called for gouging out the eyes of a bat. How the caster thought the elements of that spell might interact in a way that would cause the intended victim to undergo a complete change of heart is, to put it mildly, a complete mystery. But that’s not the point.
To be heartsick enough to invite divine intervention to rectify a love problem is a reminder of how fundamental desire has always been to the human condition.
And today, if the powers that be don’t answer, there’s probably a therapist who will.
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics, emeritus, at Colgate University. He has recorded six courses for The Great Courses and written many books, including the forthcoming Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Love and Sex in the Ancient World But Weren’t Around to Ask.
Primary editor: Jackie Mansky | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard