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

FESTIVALS

to the goddess. With this was continued the custom of religious prostitution, which according to Herodotus (i, 198; ii, 64) was usual, not only in Paphos, but throughout the whole island of Cyprus generally. Comparing it with the similar custom in Babylon, we must conclude that the girls once in their life repaired to the sanctuary of Aphrodite (Melitta) and surrendered to the first friend who presented himself (see the romance of Nitocris, priestess of Ishtar: H. V. Schumacher, Berlin, 1922).

3. THe ANpDRocyNous IpEA OF LIFE

We shall have to deal in a later chapter with Greek homosexuality in greater detail. However, in this place we must anticipate the fact that the Greeks possessed a really astonishing notion of the double sexual (hermaphroditic) nature of the human being in the embryonic condition and of the androgynous idea of life generally. Hence, in the history of Greek civilization, we meet with not a few ideas and usages which have their origin in the conception of the double natural arrangement of the human being or of individual gods.

In Amathus on the island of Cyprus a malefemale divinity was worshipped, in whose cult a youth once a year was obliged to lie in childbed and to imitate a woman in the pains of labour. This took place in honour of Ariadne, who landed with Theseus on Cyprus and was said to have died there in childbed, without having borne a_ child, as is told by the historian Pzon (Plutarch, Theseus, 20; and Hesychius, s.v. “A¢péd:ros), who also mentions the hermaphrodite god Aphroditos. According to Macrobius (Saturnalia, ii, 8, 2) his statue was bearded, with the bodily form and dress of a female, but with male sexual organs; at sacrifices men wore female, and women male

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