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

FESTIVALS

wanton bands. Such a nightly festival was called Pannychis, which then also became a favourite name for hetairze. The latter, “ almost naked in fine-spun attire in long array,” to quote the words of Eubulus (Ath., xiii, 568¢ (Kock, i1, 193, frag. 84)), “ sold their favours for a small fee, which everyone might enjoy safely and without danger.”

The festival of Aphrodite Anosia (Ath., xiii, 589¢ ; Scholiast on Aristoph., Plutus, 179; Plutarch, Amatorius, 767f), celebrated in Thessaly, may have had a homosexual background, since men were excluded, although details are wanting—the only thing we know is that erotic flagellations also played a part.

The amiable, friendly god Hermes, who is nearly always in love, had comparatively but few festivals in Greece; but, on the other hand, his memory is kept alive almost at every step by the remarkable arrangement of the so-called Hermes columns, or, more correctly, Hermes pillars. By these are meant stone pillars with elaborate head, which at first represented Hermes, and then other divinities, and a phallus.

After what has already been described it is easy to understand that the few festivals that belong to the god Hermes do not lack an erotic background. But Hermes was regarded by the Greeks as the type of the bloom of man’s beauty, as it is represented with the greatest purity in the transition from the boy to the young man. Remember the lines of Homer (Od., x, 277; also Aristoph., Clouds, 978 ; Plato, Protagoras, beginning), in which it is told how Odysseus, arrived at the land of Circe, sets out to explore the country and to find out whether it is inhabited, and by what kind of men. On the way he is met by Hermes, who is of course unknown to him, “in the form of a young man, whose lips are covered by the first down, whose youthful bloom is especially charming.” Hence it is not by mere chance that, at the festival of Hermes at

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