In Rome during the first and second centuries, explicit evidence abounds about heterosexual desire for women, such as in the story of Europa, featured here in this first-century fresco from Pompeii. Another appears in the novel __Leucippe and Clitophon_, which relays the repeated abductions of the heroine Leucippe, who successfully escapes and consumates her romance with the hero Clitophon.
At some point in the story, Clitophon gets into a debate with another man over the relative attractiveness of women or young men as sex partners. Male-to-male sexual relationships were quite typical in certain contexts, and there was a standard idea that males from adolescence until they grew beards were particularly desirable.
Clitophon, however, argues that women are more desirable for several reasons — their beauty does not fade as quickly, the Gods have abducted more women than men (and the tastes of the Gods are divine), and women are better in bed. In fact, he has an entire panegyric (book II, 37.6-38 if you are interested) about the female orgasm, “the most elaborate encomium [on it] . . . That the Ancient world has left to us,” according to Classisist Kyle Harper. And that is saying something.
Source(s): The description of the female orgasm was so racy that the Loeb translator of __Leucippe and Clitophon_ left the whole section in Latin. You can look it up yourself: Stephen Gaselee, 1917, from the Greek original by Achilles Tatius. _From Shame to Sin_, Kyle Harper, page 23, Harvard UP, 2013.
