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

DANCE aND BaALL-GameEs

adorned with large-scale pictures rich in figures by Polygnotus, one of which represented the conquest of Troy and the departure of the Greeks, the other a visit of Odysseus to the underworld.

In course of time there was in every fairly large place a pandokeion (an inn) ; and in most frequented places, such as Olympia or Cnidus (Olympia : Schol. Pindar, Olympia, xi, 55; Hlian, Var. hist., lv, 9; Cnidus: Lucian, Amores, 12), where every year strangers thronged in vast crowds to see the famous temple and the statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles, and not last of all, on account of the joys of love that were to be enjoyed there, such places of shelter were maintained at the public expense. When Thucydides (iii, 68) also relates that the inn erected by the Spartans in Plateza near the temple of Hera was 200 feet long and contained plenty of rooms for strangers, we must still regard these strangers’ courts as being as primitive as possible. Thus one had to bring his own bedclothes, for which reason nobody ever travelled without one or more slaves to carry his baggage (cf. Xenoph., Memorab., iii, 13," 6).

Course these inns were entirely different according to their class; some of them, as everywhere at all times, were regular dens of thieves, where the stranger could not be sure of his life. Thus Cicero (Divin., i, 27, 57; the second story in Lnvent., ii, 4, 14) tells us: “ When two friends, Arcadians, were travelling together and had reached Megara, one put up with an innkeeper, another with a friendly host. When they had had supper and retired to rest, in their first sleep the one who was staying with his friend dreamed that the other begged him to help him, because the innkeeper was preparing to kill him. At first he woke up terrified ; then, when he had composed himself, he lay down again, thinking that what he had seen was nothing. Then, after he had gone to sleep, his friend again appeared and begged him, since

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