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The very existence of contraceptives, real or imagined, argues eloquently for Greek wives having had a more assertive, independent Nature than that with which they are generally credited, even if only a determination to enjoy a little sex without the encumbrance of pregnancy. Another popular method of birth control was ‘misy', copper sulphate, which was thought, when drunk in solution, to ward off pregnancy for a year. The idea of heavy metals as contraceptives persisted for thousands of years. Women of other ancient cultures would
drink water from blacksmiths' fire buckets, and English women near Birmingham as recently as 1914 drank, as a contraceptive, water boiled with copper coins.

Most literary genres in classical Greece depict women less like chaste goddesses or dangerous energy-sapping sex addicts, and more like the women of these sanctuaries – normal mortals suffering or enjoying the same sort of erotic desires as men. The reality of female sexuality was not as well represented, however, by the medicine of Ancient Greece, the famous Hippocratic Corpus, the body of so-called medical knowledge either garnered by a mysterious ‘Hippocrates' (or, more likely, a group of practitioners around 400 BC who all called themselves Hippocrates) and celebrated in name to this day by the Hippocratic Oath.

It is self-evident that the ancients, free from such tedious requirements as scientific data, more often than not made up their medical pronouncements as they went along. Medical experts were, naturally, all men, and they unsurprisingly devised a model for sexuality that seems rather to justify male sexual acquisitiveness. They averred that women ‘need' regular sex so as not to become ill – which conveniently gave men free range to ‘treat' them without any issue of morality intervening. They were, after all, doing women a medical favour by having sex with them. Women therefore dare not for their own health's sake refuse their husbands sex, even when they felt no desire for them. In Ancient Egyptian and Hippocratic medicine conversely, an active female desire for sex, its symptoms including arousal, erotic fantasy, vaginal lubrication and generally melancholic or irrational behaviour, was known as an illness called
hysteria
– literally, a sickness caused by shifting of the uterus; the word
hysteria
has the same root as hysterectomy.

The Hippocratic author of a section of the corpus called
De Virginibus
asserts that the suicidal tendency of young virgins was due to lack of sex, rather than their being married off at the age of twelve to dirty old men. He thinks that the
best cure is for women to marry young. Women, he contends, have a psychological need for sex yet no conscious desire for it or knowledge of what they really require physically. The satisfaction of their appetite has little to do with pleasure, apart from simply relieving the pressure of their blood on their heart. (It should be noted that the concept of hysteria as being almost interchangeable with orgasmic was only officially dropped by the American Psychiatric Association as late as 1952, and only then because of the confusion with the more modern meaning of hysteria.)

A connection is also seen in Ancient Greek medical hypothesising between female orgasm and the enhancement of fertility. For the Hippocratics, it has been said, a woman's enjoyment of sex is not proof that she will become pregnant; rather, becoming pregnant is evidence that she enjoyed intercourse. Some women apparently insisted accordingly that their husband bring them to orgasm as a means of improving the chance of begetting children. This, at least, is the way they put it.

With fertility in mind, then, if not shared adult pleasure, people were willing to go to great trouble to try to bring about simultaneous mutual orgasm, using, according to Thomas W. Laqueur, a physician and historian of sex at the University of California, Berkeley, both foreplay and an assortment of natural remedies.
(Tribulus terrestris
or ‘puncture vine' from Bulgaria, oriental ginseng, the bark of the tropical African
Corynanthe yohimbe
tree, the Brazilian
Muira puama
(‘potency wood') stem, the Mexican damiana leaf, wood betony from Europe, ashwagandha (winter cherry) root from India, Central American saw palmetto berries and
Avena sativa
– wild oats – have all been used at various times in the past as aphrodisiacs to enhance erection, sexual stamina and so on.)

Female sexual pleasure and orgasm were not necessarily synonymous in Greece, however. Women were thought to feel pleasure from the moment of penetration, and then experience
a steady level of enjoyment from the friction of the penis in the vagina, rather than any kind of peak of excitement. ‘Once intercourse has begun,' one Hippocratic writer states, ‘the woman experiences pleasure throughout the whole time, until the man ejaculates. If her desire for intercourse is excited, she emits before the man, and for the remainder of the time she does not feel pleasure to the same extent; but if she is not in a state of excitement, then her pleasure terminates along with that of the man.'

The Hippocratic notion of the womb was of an independent entity within a woman's body that could override the woman's will with its own desires. The best way to fight the womb back was to sit the woman on some perfumes and burn mule-dung under her nose. The womb would flee from the bad smell around the brain and be attracted towards the good odour, closer to where it belongs, in the region of the pelvis. The woman's sexual desire – not surprisingly, given the mule dung under her nose – would then dissipate.

The Hippocratic Corpus was not the only repository of medical assertion and supposition. Everyone was allowed to chip in with a bit of homespun sexual advice. Aristotle, a man of extraordinary breadth of interest and wisdom but not known as a physician, felt free nevertheless to opine in
The Nicomachean Ethics
that, ‘Erection is chiefly caused by parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns bruised to powder and drunk in muscatel, scallion, sea shellfish, etc' – and be taken seriously. (To be fair, Aristotle's body of opinion on sexual matters was generally more considered than this. He was often ahead of his time. He did not agree, for example, with those who believed that a woman's need for sex was caused by the displacement of the womb.) Plato, Aristotle's tutor, could similarly mention in passing (although quite sensibly, as it happens) that male and female sexual experience are ‘owing to the same causes', and be taken, again, as an authority. This free-for-all in medical advice-mongering, although not unique to the intellectual hothouse of Athens,
still seems alien and bogus compared to later cultures that valued what we recognise as expertise.

Despite the wide variety of great thoughts in circulation on sex, there was still no agreement in Ancient Greece as to how sexual reproduction took place. In Homer's day, around 800 BC, it was believed that the female became pregnant as a result of airborne
‘animalculae'
that somehow found their way inside the woman. The Hippocratics believed in some form of meeting between male and female seed. Male seed was provided by a sudden, and highly pleasurable, ejaculation from the body, so it was thought that the mother must also contribute the same sort of fluid to help form the foetus This would explain why a child resembled its mother, but was not taken as an indication that women played an equal part in reproduction to the extent that husbands ought to be concerned that their wives' enjoyed sex. The Hippocratics connected the production of female seed with orgasm, too, but were not convinced that the wife had to enjoy her orgasm as the husband enjoyed his. Aristotle, who tended to dissent from Hippocratic conclusions, thought females produced semen from their ovaries and an egg was in the womb, this from a combination of menstrual blood and the female sperm. Four hundred years later, the physician Galen, whose influence dominated medicine in Europe and the Muslim Middle East until the seventeenth century, came close to a modern understanding of conception with his theory that female testes made semen which, when mixed with male semen in the womb, produced an embryo.

Galen also believed women could desire intercourse for its own, pleasurable sake. He was one of the first physicians to advocate therapeutic masturbation or finger ‘stimulation' for frustrated women such as widows and nuns. Previously, in the section of the Hippocratic Corpus known as
De semine
, women's orgasm was seen as a reflection of men's. Aristotle thought both sexes' desire for intercourse could be prompted by the need to expel fluid after a period of celibacy. The
Hippocratics did not imagine orgasm could serve as an incitement to a woman to want intercourse; if a woman fails to orgasm, therefore, she would not be left frustrated. Aristotle, again, disagreed with this. Putting an interesting new spin on the question, he professed himself aware that both sexes could be incited beyond any immediate need for sexual intercourse by the memory of past pleasures. Therefore the desire for orgasm could be summoned up from the imagination in both sexes even when there was no pressing physical build-up of seminal material.

Despite the lack of consensus over so much about sex, the Greeks did at least come quite close to working out what and where the clitoris was, even though it would be thousands of years before this information was properly understood in Europe. The Hippocratics did not mention the clitoris (although neither did
Gray's Anatomy
as late as 1918), but literary figures such as the poet Hipponax of Ephesus and the playwright Aristophanes both seem to refer to it by the name
myrton
(myrtle berry), and some scholars believe Sappho, the sixth-century BC poetess and Lesbos's most celebrated inhabitant, used the word
nymphe
(bride) to refer to the clitoris. Aristotle mentioned it, too: ‘An indication that the female emits no semen is afforded by the fact that in intercourse, the pleasure is produced in the same place as in the male by contact, yet it is not the place from which the liquid is emitted,' he wrote.

A peculiar feature of Greek medical thinking on sex and orgasm was an emphasis on the importance of heat to the process, almost as if it were a chemical reaction in a test tube that required help from a Bunsen burner. That is why in Greek writing on sex there is much imagery of fire and water, loosely applied as and when it could illustrate a particular theory. Some held, for instance, that the womb was a dry, painful area that could only be sated by men's sexual fluid. Others suggested that fertility required extra heat in the vaginal area.

In the Hippocractic Corpus, a writer contends: ‘In the case of women, it is my contention that when, during intercourse,
the vagina is rubbed and the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in the rest of the body … A woman also releases something from her body, sometimes in the womb, which then becomes moist, and sometimes externally as well, if the womb is open wider than normal.'

The Hippocratic belief that women's sexual pleasure ceases promptly when the male ejaculates is similarly explained in terms of heat and combustion: ‘What happens is like this: if into boiling water you pour another quantity of water which is cold, the water stops boiling … In the same way, the man's sperm arriving in the womb extinguishes both the heat and the pleasure of the woman. Both the pleasure and the heat reach their peak simultaneously with the arrival of sperm in the womb, and then they cease. If, for example, you pour wine on a flame, first of all the flame flares up and increases for a short period when you pour the wine on. In the same way the woman's heat flares up in response to the man's sperm and then dies away. The pleasure experienced by the woman during intercourse is considerably less than the man's, although it lasts longer. The reason that the man feels more pleasure is that the secretion from the bodily fluid in his case occurs suddenly, and as the result of a more violent disturbance than in the woman's case.'

Another Hippocratic theorist avers that if a woman is too excited before intercourse, she will ‘ejaculate prematurely', meaning that her womb will close and she will not conceive. ‘Like a flame that flares when wine is sprinkled on it, the woman's heat blazes most brilliantly when the male sperm is sprayed on it … She shivers. The womb seals itself. And the combined elements for a new life are safely contained within.' Another Hippocratic argued that the need to have fluid inserted into the womb to quench its thirst ensured that a woman could not turn to her female companions to free her from sexual dependence on her husband.

For Galen, writing long after the Hippocratics, heat during
sexual climax is crucial to conception; simultaneous orgasm generates enough heat to ‘commingle the seed, the animate matter, and create new life'. Later texts also recommend mutual simultaneous orgasm as the best way of dealing with the unfortunate consequences for fertility of a woman being too cold or too hot.

In her anxiety to conceive, or at least to convince her husband it was important for him to satisfy her so she might better do so, it is easy to forget female masturbation and the role – considerable in fact – that it played in the sex life of Ancient Greeks. Female masturbation was discounted by Greek medical writing. For the usual reasons of sexual politics, the Hippocratic authors would not countenance the notion of women being able to dispense with the need for their husband through masturbation. One writer announces, quite spuriously one would guess, that women do not get stones in the bladder as often as men do ‘because they do not masturbate'. Even if a wife used a dildo on occasion, in Hippocratic medical thought it could not benefit her because of its inherent inability to introduce semen into her womb. Masturbation simply could not fulfil women's sexual appetite.

Female masturbation is equally glossed over by most Greek painting and literature, but this is largely because women were so rarely portrayed in Greek art. Hans Licht, a classics professor at Leipzig University, nevertheless came to the daring deduction in a 1932 book,
Sexual Life in Ancient Greece
, that Ancient Greek women were avid masturbators.