All across the world, you will probably have read, people are having less sex. In Britain and the US, in France and Australia, frequency of sex has been on the decline (although Denmark appears to be bucking the trend). In 2018, the US magazine the Atlantic declared a “sex recession”, while last December the Telegraph ran a piece headlined “Sex is dying out. This is why it matters”.

As an ancient historian with a particular interest in the history of sex, this drought is fascinating to me – not least because some of the articles I have read seem keen to hark back to the historical period I spend most of my time researching. “Sex should be more wild and plentiful than it has been since ancient Greece,” reported the Telegraph. But antiquity was no bastion of sexual freedom – especially for women.

While in the modern world men are often perceived as the hornier sex, ancient Greeks and Romans believed the opposite to be true. In fact, I might go so far as to say that our ancient counterparts would be rather surprised by modern surveys that have found women are more likely to lose interest in sex and, when they do have it, are much less likely to experience an orgasm – two things that are probably related. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean, women were often seen as “nymphomaniacs”, their voracious sexual appetites a constant problem that needed to be solved – a school of thought that continued to be influential well into the medieval period.