This chapter argues that a significant number of central figures shown on stelae were not the dedicants of the stelae, but instead used visual markers that identified them as children. In the first century BCE, children were most often aged and gendered in depictions by their nudity. At sites of the second and third centuries CE, by contrast, the images of children shared iconographies and conceptualizations of their subjects with funerary monuments for children from across the empire. In particular, togas, scrolls, pets, and hairstyles, as well as showing the figures older than they were, reflects how child offerings were being reconceived as social persons and subjects of empire.

This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

Questions about dress and undress are charged issues. Past and present in Zambia, nudity and degrees of undress have been contentious issues when performed in public rather than when subject to the private gaze. Body baring events sexualise different body parts, making the body surface a highly charged site and turning dress and undress into powerful matters with bearing on questions about the constitution of society and women’s and men’s places in it. Spontaneous or organised by individuals or groups, bare body demonstrations have complicated implications, some protest oriented and others celebratory as illustrated in episodes from the late colonial period and more recent events. Throughout this period, the shame frontier shifted from the baring of breasts to the wearing of bras.

In both his writings and appearance, Richard Wright was acutely attuned to the power of dress to convey meaning and build identity. From his early stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children, where the clothed and naked bodies of young Southern Black men signify poverty, innocence and, to whites, danger, through his late novel, Savage Holiday, where the naked body of a white man precipitates chaos and disaster, Wright’s attention to clothing and to the naked and nude bodies of Black and white men and women—including his meticulous self-presentation as an expatriate writer in Paris—allowed him to explore how attire and style produced sensations of self. The rituals of dressing (Lawd Today), the temptations of naked skin revealed beneath robes and coats (Native Son, The Outsider), the forms of nudity (“Big Boy Leaves Home,” Savage Holiday), the class dimensions of clothing (Black Boy) serve to display psychological and sociological forces of race, gender, sexuality, and power.