Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

THE Human FIGURE

to the feet they wore a skirt which consisted of numerous pieces laid one over the other, as if made of several skirts. The upper part of the body was covered by a fairly tight-fitting garment, like a jacket, provided with sleeves. From this garment the breasts protruded, totally bare in their full roundness ; like two ripe love-apples they laughed at the spectator.

We shall return again to this costume, when we speak of nakedness and denudation in connection with each other. In any case, the Cretan finds prove that the artful way of leaving the neck and shoulders uncovered and indeed, as we saw, in its most defiant form, is not foreign to the oldest Greek civilization; further that probably, and as a matter of course, it continued to be a right reserved for the upper-class lady.

It is quite logical and easy to show that with the further development of Greek civilization the bare neck and shoulders, which in Crete had begun by promising so much, again disappears from female fashion. ‘The magnificent court banquets, at which the ladies could shine with the dazzling nakedness of their bosom, gradually became forgotten, since, except during the short period of the Greek “tyrants”’, republics were formed everywhere ; and further since, as is frequently indicated, civilization developed more and more on the male side, which led to the disappearance of women from public life, so that they no longer had the opportunity of charming the senses of men with their cunningly refined dress—or, more correctly, their undress.

We certainly find here and there among those of the Greek female statues that are robed a rather bashful and usually pointed décolletage, though it cannot be said that such became the favourite fashion ; laterfavoured again by the climate—there seems to have come into vogue the alternative custom of wearing upper garments so thin that the forms of the breasts

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