The study of women in antiquity is a well-established area of research in the classics. In The Erotics of Domination, Ellen Greene re-examines long-held scholarly attitudes concerning the representation of male sexual desire and female subjection in the Latin love poetry of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid.

Examining first-person poetic personae that have often been romanticized by critics, Greene finds that male sexuality is consistently threatened as moral resolve and social status are undermined by desires that render men passively "womanish": powerless and emotional.