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Ancient and modern

A sex education from Aristophanes

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

5 June 2021

9:00 AM

The publication of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon reminded the comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes of her frustrations at school, when she found that the lexica either translated sexual vocabulary into Latin or otherwise bowdlerised it. So when she read the comic poet Aristophanes, she decided that any word she could not identify meant ‘vagina’.

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