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

NAKEDNESS

far from being ashamed of these organs, the Greeks rather regarded them with pious awe and treated them with an almost religious reverence as the mystical instruments of propagation, as the symbols of nature, life-producing and inexhaustibly fruitful. Hence we must understand the terms aidotov and aiddés, not as “parts of shame,” “ privy parts,” of which one should be ashamed, but as those which arouse the feeling of aidds, that is, awe and pious adoration of the incomprehensible secret of the power of propagation belonging to nature, that ever renews itself, and of the preservation of the human race that is thereby rendered possible. Thus the phallus! became a religious symbol; the worship of the phallus in its most various forms is the naive adoration of the inexhaustible fruitfulness of nature and the thanks of the naturally sensitive human being for the propagation of the human race.

We shall have to speak of the phallus-cult elsewhere: here it is enough to emphasize that it does not, aS ignorance or malice affirms, represent a gross immorality, but just the opposite, since it is nothing else but the view of the divine nature of the process of generation carried to its last extreme and depending upon the natural, and consequently in the highest degree moral, conception of the sexual. The further consequence of the conception was that the Greeks, on all occasions when clothing was felt to be wumnecessary, burdensome, or impossible, went over to complete nakedness, without making use of any kind of apron or piece of stuff that concealed the private parts.

There was no such lack of taste in ancient Greece. As is shown by the word Gymnasion (from gumnos,

* The phallus (daAAds) was the Greek name for the male member, especially when artistically imitated for any purpose in horn, more frequently in wood, especially of the fig-tree. Linguistically the word is connected with ¢aAys (post, pillar), which is also used in the sense of penis: cf. Aristoph., Thesmoph., 291; Lysistrata, 771; Anthol. Pal., ix, 437. It corresponds to the Indian lingam.