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

THE ANDROGYNOUS IDEA oF LIFE

clothing. To understand these usages, we shall first have to deal with the form of Hermaphroditos.

According to the most detailed story told by Ovid (Metamorphoses, iv, 285), Hermaphroditos grew up a dazzingly beautiful boy, who at the age of fifteen kindled the love of Salmacis, the nymph of a spring of the same name in Caria; against his will he was enticed by her down into the water and forced to have connection with her; desiring never to be separated from her lover, the gods united them into a single being of two sexes. According to the desire of Hermaphroditos, Hermes and Aphrodite bestowed upon the spring the property that every man who bathed in it came out as semivir (half-man, half-woman) and effeminate in character.1 With this it is very probable that, in the subconsciousness of the people ideas of the androgynous origin of life, and also contact with Oriental androgynous cults, may have cooperated. Such dissemination of the views of the Orient are frequently attested in Greece ; we may remember the change of clothing at marriage. ‘Thus in Sparta the bride wore male clothing, on the island of Cos the bridegroom (Plutarch, Lycurgus, 15; on Cos, Moralia, 394), Just as the priests of Heracles and he himself, wore female dress. In Argos a festival was celebrated every year, in which both men and women wore the dress of the opposite sex, the feast called Hybristika, to be spoken of later.

Mythological investigation has proved that the conception of androgynous divinities had already arisen in ancient times and was not a product of the so-called decadence, although the name Hermaphroditos does not occur in Homer and Hesiod, but is for the first time met with in

* There are no essential variations of the story: cf. Hyginus, Fabule, 271; Martial, vi, 68,9; x, 4, 6; xiv, 174: masculus intravit fontes, emersit utrumque ; pars est una patris, cetera matris habet. Ausonius, Epigrammata, 76, 11 ; Statius, Silve, i, 5,21; Diodorus Siculus, iv, 6; Anthol. Pal., ix, 317, 783; ll, tor; Hans Licht, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der antiken Erotik in der Bearbeitung von Lukians Erotes, Miinchen, 1920.

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