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

FESTIVALS

Orgiastic dances were also common in many other festivals of Artemis, but to go more into detail would only be a repetition of what has been already said.

We need not here refer again to the wild boisterousness of the menads, since this is sufficiently well known; that the phallus played a great part in it has already been said. On a redfigured vase from the Acropolis we see a completely naked mzenad, swinging a phallus in an ecstatically enraptured attitude of dancing. Phalli of stone or other material, as well as figures and figurines have been found in large quantities in the course of excavations. If the Dionysiac orgies originally held good for the god of fruitfulness, they became gradually a symbol of something higher, especially of the union with the divine that is hoped for and attained by ecstasy, an impulse which is deeply rooted in man’s heart and owes to Dionysus its victorious march through the Greek world’.

From a certainly very mutilated inscription (Corpus Inscriptionum Grecarum, ii, 321) we learn that measures were taken, even in war, to secure that the phallus procession should be led safely into the city. That the colonies were obliged to send phalli to the great Dionysia at Athens has already been mentioned; and it is interesting to note that we still possess an account from the island of Delos, according to which a gigantic phallus which was once prepared for this purpose and made of wood cost 43 drachme ; it was cut by a certain Caicus and painted by Sostratus (Bulletin de Correspondance Hellémique, xxix, 1995, Pp. 450).

Unfortunately Pausanias, when speaking of the mysteries celebrated in honour of Dionysus and

1 On the phallus cf. Plutarch, De Cupiditate divitiarum, 527d :

“ The festival of the Dionysia was in old times celebrated in a popular and cheerful manner ; a wine-jar was carried round and a vine-branch ; then someone brought a goat, another a basket full of figs ; and over all the phallus.’ In the magnificent procession, arranged by Ptolemy

Philadelphus in Alexandria, ‘(a4 gigantic phallus accompanied it” (Callixenus, in Ath., v, 196).

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