A result of this close reading of ancient texts is to make you appreciate how hard it is to really "understand" the culture of previous societies. This is how Part Two starts:

A mistrust of the pleasures, an emphasis on the consequences of their abuse for the body and the soul, a valorization of marriage and marital obligations, a disaffection with regard to the spiritual meanings imputed to the love of boys: a whole attitude of severity was manifested in the thinking of philosophers and physicians in the course of the first two centuries.

I think this is clearly supposed to make us think about our own modern Christian approach to sex, but actually throughout the rest of the book Foucault will consistently underline how all these characteristics acquire and lose different meanings in the periods under review--so he's teasing us here. The point is that our own preconceptions of "same" and "different" influence how we at first conceptualize other, or older, cultures; in order to get out of that narrow view, we need to engage in the kind of highly nuanced close reading Foucault engages in here, which helps show how truly various our ways of thinking about sexuality and the body have been/can be, instead of the simplistic way we narrate that history today.

Might that have political implications? Foucault's cleverness is that he doesn't say this himself, but I think we can infer it (if we agree with him).

This book also sensitizes you to the dilemmeas of theorizing historical change vs. continuity. How does one period transition into the next? This doesn't seem problematic to us ordinarily--we can easily narrate to ourselves the roaring twenties into the Great Depression and WWI and WWII, then the postwar years, then neoliberalism and so on--but Foucault's way of arranging the material, focusing on differences while also ending each chapter by teeing up how it dovetails with some new twist in sexual ideology, presents the whole change vs. continuity dichotomy as a genuine, possibly irresolvable intellectual dilemma.

Re: the care of the self in general: I wonder if Clavicular would get anything from this book?