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

ATTIC COMEDY

Thus, about the end of the fifth century, in Athens, a famous poet courted the favour of a distinguished youth equally celebrated for his beauty and refined culture.

Certainly the few fragments give no detailed information as to the content of the drama. Euripides also shares the opinion, elsewhere often expressed, that Laius was the first who introduced pederasty into Greece. Laius also appears to have struggled against his passion, especially in view of the opinion of the Greeks who, at that time, regarded love generally as a disease, since it disturbs the tranquillity of the mind and must therefore be combated with the weapons of understanding. Just as Medea struggles against her love for Jason (Ovid, Metam., 720) so also Laius complains (Eurip., frag. 841) that one knows what is right, but does what is wrong. It is probable that the drama ended with the death of Chrysippus, since it is a tragedy ; it is impossible to say more owing to the discrepancies of tradition.

II. Attic Comedy

The comedy of the Greeks is the result of the exuberant humour of piety elevated by wine, which has its root in gratitude to Dionysus, the great banisher of care and bringer of joy, the eternally youthful god of the fruitfulness of luxuriant nature that ever renews itself. Hence comedy is saturated with obscenities, which are inseparably united with the cult of the spirits of fruitfulness. As comedy is the mirror of life grotesquely caricatured, so sexual life meets us everywhere in Greek comedy in its dominating importance, a bubbling witches’ cauldron, a monstrous orgy, in which the infinitely complicated machinery of all sexual practices and of all erotic varieties are whirled round the towering axis of a grotesque gigantic phallus in a manner calculated to bewilder the senses. As now in the sexual life of the Greeks

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