Abstract
This chapter discusses the topic of sexuality in Lucians’ Verae Historiae, namely the sailors’ encounter with the vine-women and the lifestyle of the male-only society of the Moon. Several scholars have showed that Lucian’s hybrids clearly mock the fears of his times regarding femininity and the gender dichotomies. Popescu argues that the reader fears sexual encounters resulting in impotence. When male dreams of potency are challenged in the vine-women’s episode, Lucian shows that a utopian universe without women will lead to the reemergence of femininity inside the males who struggle to perform both the inseminating and the gestational role, either in sequence or at the same time. Lucian’s hybrid anatomies (hermaphrodites or eunuchs), created strictly from the need to overcompensate for the absence of the female “other”, only reflect that no eradication of femininity is possible because it permanently returns both in anatomy and physiology, as long as the reader thinks in strictly binary terms.