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

THE THEATRE

this we must remember that not only the love of Byblis for her brother Caunus, but also that of Myrrha for her father Cinyras, of Harpalyce for her father Clymenus, were brought forward on the stage. Certainly Ovid (Tristia, ti, 381-408) did not exaggerate when, after giving a long list of erotic tragedies, he says that time did not allow him to mention all of them by name—indeed, that a list of the titles alone would be enough to fill his book.t

While Aristophanes (Clouds, 1372; Frogs, 850, 1043 ff., 1081), thus the chief representative of the Old Comedy, attacked the conquest of the stage by the representation of the passion of love brought in by Euripides, that is, as the centre and driving impulse of a drama—for his own pieces, as we saw, are also filled with erotic—this also was altered by the advent of the New Comedy. As the women in their life emancipated themselves more and more from the retirement imposed upon them in ancient times, so also in comedy the love of man for a woman occupied an increasingly greater space. Gradually love-intrigues and the sentimental life of love formed the chief subject of comedies. Hence Plutarch (in Stobeeus, Florilegium, 63, 64) rightly says that “the poetry of Menander was held together by a single bond—by love, which breaks forth in all his comedies like a single breath of life”. Yet even now the sensual side of love remains the chief thing, for all the young women of the New Comedy, whom the young men court in longing passion, are hetaire. Man still remained convinced that marriage was a fulfilment of duty, relation with an hetaira an affair of love.

It may be taken for granted as well known that the ancient stage managed with few actors and that the female parts also were taken by men.

By the side of the strange masks, mad inventions and jokes, ancient comedy is still characterized by

1 Cf. his Ars Amatoria, i, 283-340; Propertius, iii, 19; Virgil, Zineid, vi, 442 ff.

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