Admirers of V.'s Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome will find much to please and provoke them here too. The illustrations take pride of place, some 195, in colour, often full-page or larger, mostly of objects in the collection of the British Museum. Short though it is, however, V.'s text, witty and wide-ranging, is not unworthy of them.

Insisting that ‘erotica’ is not an ancient category, V. seeks to interpret the meaning of the many objects and images she discusses within their proper context, to ‘put Greek sex back into a world of nude bodies and sympotic culture, Roman sex back into a world of empire and cultural appropriation’ (pp. 234–5). The ancients, she says, used sexual images to question, challenge and play with their own cultural conventions; and she does not hesitate to subject some of ours to the same penetrating gaze. (What is ‘pornography’ – and does this book qualify? How much should our view of ancient sexual violence be modified by the realisation that rape within marriage was countenanced in English and Welsh law until 1991?) After an introductory chapter which stresses how prevalent ‘sex scenes’ were in Greece and Rome, where the erect phalluses of herms guarded Athenian buildings, erotic paintings identified lockers in the baths, much like images of trees and animals do sections of contemporary car parks, and penis-shaped pendants around Roman necks warded off evil, V.'s second chapter, ‘Exposure’, denaturalises nudity, always more characteristic of Greek art than of Roman and of men than of women and never to be taken for granted. ‘Fantasy’ explores how artists blurred fact and fiction, male and female, citizen and slave, human and animal to help viewers think about who they were. In ‘Divine Encounters’ V. confronts the ever-present sexuality of the gods, not merely an element in ancient anthropomorphism and a way to come to terms with their power – the F-word expresses the ineffable – but also an index of the force of desire, strong enough to make Zeus disport himself as an ant. Sexual violence is the theme of the fifth chapter, ‘satyr porn’ as well as the way of a god with a maid. Do satyrs do what all men would like to? Or are their rapes and ravishings subhuman behaviour? And does it matter that the victims of their violence are nymphs? (‘No mortal women were harmed in the making of this pot.’) The final chapter turns to collectors' lust for these antiquities and the contradictions contained within their collections. A helpful guide to further reading rounds out the book, of interest for its observations – for example, that ancient authors are surprisingly silent about women's fatness or thinness – as well as for its bibliography. The Warren Cup, perhaps the museum's most spectacular sex on show, provides a kind of continuity, cropping up as an example of shockingly explicit sex, as a fantasy based on the Romans' ongoing experimentation with Greek culture, as an instance of the foibles of collectors and the vagaries of taste. Judged too racy to include among the many pieces of ancient erotic art E.P. Warren gave to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as an element in a ‘paederastic evangel’, the cup was refused entry into the US in the 1950s and admitted to the British Museum only in 1999; replicas are now on sale in the museum's shop.

It is sometimes hard to focus on V.'s text amidst so many glorious pictures and the eye sometimes blinks at what it sees there. For example, I doubt that a Roman viewer would regard a man being fellated by a woman as a passive partner (pp. 11–12) and, much as I like V.'s extended account of Dionysus (pp. 134–46), he is less like Apollo than she thinks. (We may be able to ferret out references to Dionysus' love affairs, but in general he is presented as satisfactorily sorted with Ariadne; Apollo, scorned and eluded by male and female alike despite his ideal beauty, loses the lovers he does manage to attract.) The discussion of Antinous and Jesus, both powerfully passive and mediators between mortals and gods, is insightful – but surely both are ‘androgynous’ rather than ‘androgenous’ (p. 167). At times too the book's burdens – engaging both specialists and those who need to be told that Zeus is the same god as Jupiter, relying mostly on what the British Museum has to show – are heavy even for V. But pornographic, erotic, or whatever, Sex on Show is lovely, marred only by the British Museum comma (‘attributed to London-born sculptor, Joseph Nollekens …’).