Ancient Beginnings

Erotic literature is as old as writing itself. The Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible uses intensely sensual imagery. Ovid's Art of Love was a practical guide to seduction in ancient Rome. The Kama Sutra integrated sexual technique with spiritual philosophy.

Sappho of Lesbos described desire between women with a directness and beauty that was celebrated in her own time, only for most of her work to be lost over the following centuries — not deliberately suppressed, but neglected as her archaic dialect fell out of fashion and demand to copy her dwindled. Her surviving fragments — mostly preserved as quotations in other writers' work — are among the oldest love poems we have.