In the texts discussed in this section, it is particularly important to keep in mind that these are fictional depictions, created for specific rhetorical purposes. While the women and their sexual activities in these texts need to make sense to the audience (to say nothing of needing to be imaginable by the author), these are not neutral, documentary descriptions of random real-life women. We have a complete absence of neutral documentation of real-life Roman women who engaged in sex with women. That doesn't mean that we can't envision such lives based on biased and polemical texts of this sort, but it does mean that we will be adding our own (modern and biased) layers, whether we're filtering out the misogyny baked into Roman literature or trying to imagine the interior lives of the women these authors are holding up for ridicule. In such exercises, I think it can be useful to consider other historic contexts where the "official" literature is uniformly hostile and misogynystic, but where we do have glimpses into the interior lives of women who loved women. We can't know the specifics of Roman women's lives, but we have sound basis for expecting them to be unaligned with what men said about them.
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