By Awanthi Vardaraj

It’s impossible to deny that human beings like sex, and spend an inordinate amount of time consumed with thoughts of it. Sex may have started off as an evolutionary necessity – we had to have sex to survive as a species – but we also like sex because it’s fun, keeps us healthy, connects us to our partners (unless it’s casual, which is fine too), and it feels good.

Sex also inspires art; there are cave paintings that depict sex, clearly indicating that our ancestors spent a lot of time thinking about it too. It’s hard to escape the erotic theme in art — from paintings and statues to erotic prose and poetry — we just can’t seem to stop talking about it.

Erotic poetry was the earliest form of erotic literature, and it has been around since Ancient Greece and Rome. Those works still survive to this day and are attributed to Greek poets Straton of Sardis, Sappho of Lesbos, and Automedon.

Notable Roman writers of erotic poetry include Latin poet Albius Tibullus and the Priapeia, an anonymous collection of ninety-five poems that are a tribute to the phallic god Priapus. These and other poems from the Renaissance period were not written for a wider audience, but were circulated amongst a small group of people privately. Read more

Source: New Indian Express