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

FESTIVALS

image of Leucippus, which had female form and clothing, but male genitals. The name of the festival may be derived from the habit of undressing the wooden image at this ceremony ; it 1s not difficult to guess what more the young bride-to-be had to do, if we remember what we know of prostitution in the temple.

These strange customs appear to have found their expression also in comedy. Only miserable fragments of Menander’s Androgynos or the Cretans are preserved, but the double title allows us to conclude a posteriori that it contained hermaphroditic scenes, the more so as in the fragment a bride in the bath played a certain part (CAF, iii, pp. 18, 19 (frag. 57)). Cecilius Statius also wrote an Androgynos (Ribbeck, Com. Rom., frag. 37). When the Argives were defeated by the Spartan King Cleomenes, the women, led by Telesilla, took up arms and saved the city. To commemorate this, the festival of Hybristika (Plutarch, De mulerum virtute, 245e) was celebrated in which the sexes changed clothes. To increase the population, marriages had been permitted between full female citizens and perieci (a subject class of freemen who had no political rights). But since the latter were not considered of equal birth, according to Plutarch the women had to put on false beards, before they slept with their husbands. There was a similar custom on the island of Cos (Plutarch, Quest. Grece, 304e) where young married men received their wives in female attire ; the priests there also offered sacrifices to Heracles dressed as women. In Sparta (Plutarch, Lycurgus, 15) the bride waited for her husband in male attire, that is, wearing the himation and shoes, and with her hair cut short.

All attempts at explaiming these and similar usages seem to me erroneous. Iam myself convinced that they afford us a new proof of the conception of the androgynous idea of life that has its root

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