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

DANCE AND BaLL-Games

are wanting. If serious men during the “ drinking round” were accustomed to give themselves up to serious conversation, they sent the flute-players home, as Eryximachus did in Plato (Sympos., 176; Protagoras, 347), remarking that the flute-player might play something to herself, if she liked, or to the women in the room ; and Plato in the Protagoras declaims more vigorously against it: “ Many are unable, owing to poverty of intellect, to converse with or amuse one another over their cups. Hence they raise the price of flute-girls, and hire for hard cash the foreign note of the flutes and converse through their voice. But where honest gentlemen and educated tipplers come together, we find among them no flute-girls, dancing girls, or harp-girls, but they are quite contented with each other’s conversation, of which their own voices are the medium, without any farcical nonsense. ‘They carry on by turns, and listen attentively, although they may have drunk heavily.”

But such opinions may have formed the exception; the general taste would not like to renounce the female dancers, who, of course, later were employed for other purposes ; indeed, according to Atheneus (xiii, 607d), they were often sold by auction, and vase-paintings leave no doubt as to the sexual functions of female dancers and fluteplayers. In a drama of Chzremon (frag. 14 (Nauck?, p. 786) in Ath., xiii, 608d) it is said of such a girl who was always ready for friends: “ The one lay there, and showed in the moonlight her naked breast, after she had thrown her garment off her shoulders ; another, while dancing, had bared her left hip, naked in the sight of heaven she offered a living picture; another bared her well-rounded arms, while she flung them round the delicate neck of another. One of them exposed her thigh, as the slit in her dress with its folds opened, so that the charm of her radiant body unfolded itself beyond all expectation.”

1773