The study of gender in the ancient world has been transformed in the last forty years by the application of feminist and queer theory to ancient evidence, with results that are both illuminating and contested.

The basic analytical claim — that ancient categories of gender and sexuality were different from modern ones, and that applying modern categories anachronistically distorts our understanding — is now mainstream. The Greek and Roman active/passive distinction in sexual behavior, organized around social status and age rather than the sex of partners, is genuinely different from modern gay/straight categorization.

The evidence for women's lives in antiquity is overwhelmingly male-authored, male-focalized, and elite. What we know about ancient women's experience is filtered through texts produced by men about women. The rare exceptions — Sappho's poetry, a handful of documentary papyri, funerary inscriptions commissioned by women — are precious precisely because of their rarity.

The Etruscan evidence complicates the Greek-Roman picture in interesting ways. Etruscan tomb paintings show men and women reclining together at banquets in a way that was apparently natural in Etruscan elite culture but would have been scandalous in contemporary Athens. Gender norms varied significantly across ancient Mediterranean cultures even when those cultures were in close contact.