These same assumptions litter the texts of the tragedies. In Euripides' Medea, Jason acknowledges that he has destabilised his wife, Medea, because he has taken her marital bed from her. They each remind the other that the marital bed is a place of civil justice, because it is here, in the meeting of husband and wife, that the foundations of the community are balanced and made whole. Medea confesses that she will destroy herself when she kills her children, because they are as much a product of herself as of her man. This is not the literature of a society without visible roles for women.

Sissa should be lauded for pointing out that Greek men were as preoccupied by discussions of femininity as of masculinity. It comes as no surprise, however, that Greek aesthetics were as preoccupied with gender as were Greek social structures. Studies of Greek homosexuality have long acknowledged that even homosexual relations were expected to conform to a heterosexual paradigm. Nowhere is this truer than amongst the scholars whom Sissa most criticises for their focus on male-male relations. Kenneth Dover, in his seminal Greek Homosexuality, popularised the Greek term which described the effeminate partner in the ideal homosexual relationship. To please an older man, this partner must take on the "soft" qualities of a woman and, according to Dover, the consequent powerlessness.

To her credit, Sissa makes clear that commentators who assign power to the active and masculine role alone show a naïve reading of sexuality, ancient and modern. Hence the title of her book. For Sissa, "sensuality" is defined as "the desire to be desired" and constitutes the key to fulfilment for both Greek women and effeminate partners. Greek culture still comes out as deeply misogynistic in its denial of intellectual respect for women. Women may debate with men in the plays of Euripides, but in the reality of Athens they stayed locked indoors while their husbands sharpened each others intellects. Sissa's subtlety is to demonstrate that female bodies could be afforded a prominent place in the collective culture, even when their minds could not. In the private sphere, this in itself gave them entry into the game of love, desire and sensuality.

Unfortunately, Sissa illustrates this analysis with a series of such arcane references to psychoanalytic theory that she risks alienating readers who do not share some of her more obscure assumptions. Comparative literature is a highly theoretical field, which is why it has need of visible dedication to concrete textual scholarship from its leaders if it is to defend its niche in the academic world. Sissa shows herself a brilliant researcher when she finds echoes of specific Greek heroines in later Christian writing, less so when she ponders them as examples of Jacques-Alain Miller's models of the psyche.