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

BEAUTY CONTESTS

The goddesses themselves had set a brilliant example for such beauty contests. Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite disputed which of them was the most beautiful; but Zeus sagely shirked the decision for himself and left it to the Trojan prince Paris. ‘This beauty contest has been represented times without number in both ancient and modern literature and art, most amusingly perhaps by Lucian in the twentieth of the Dialogues of the Gods.

It is probable enough that the Greeks also knew of beauty contests among young men, considering their attitude in regard to the male, and it is at least expressly attested by Athenzeus (xiii, 565, 609) for Elis: those who gained prizes were amongst other things also distinguished by being allotted certain functions belonging to the service of the gods. Also at the festival of the Panathenza (to be afterwards mentioned) young men from the different phylae (tribes) were selected according to their beauty and dexterity for the torch race.

If, therefore, delight in the naked was a general peculiarity of the Greeks as well as of the southern peoples, it is almost as a matter of course that there also existed, or were created in the ordinary lives of individuals, many opportunities of gladdening the eye with the sight of naked beauty of the body. This delight is stronger than any moral (more correctly, conventional) consideration that exists elsewhere. We may assume that the example of the Lydian King Candaules did not remain unique ; and likewise that among the Hellenes who exulted in beauty the painful consequences—which could not fail to appear elsewhere considering the prudery, for example, of the Lydians, who were blinded by prejudice on this point—were lacking.

Candaules was very much in love with his wife and very proud of her beauty. He boasted of this beauty before others, and had no rest until his favourite, Gyges, had seen his wife naked. Gyges resisted with all his might, since, as he thought, a

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