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

Dances, Games, MEALS

he had not come to his aid when he was alive, at least not allow his death to go unavenged ; he said that he had been killed by the innkeeper, put in a cart and covered with dung; and begged him to come to the city gate in the morning before the cart left the town. Roused by this dream in the morning when the ploughman was near the gate, he asked him what was in the cart. The ploughman fled in affright; the dead man was pulled from under the dung, and the innkeeper, having confessed, paid the penalty.”

A Greek inn may also have been the scene of the story, also told by Cicero, in which the host murders a stranger from avarice and, to divert suspicion from himself, assigns ownership of the bloody sword to another traveller.

That the inns very often swarmed with bugs we could believe even were they not particularly mentioned, e.g. by Aristophanes (Frogs, 114, 549). From the same writer we learn that inns were often carried on by women. Since, besides, certainly in most of them a number of obliging girls met the most intimate desires of travellers, it is easy to explain why Theophrastus (Characters, 6) mentions inn and brothel in the same breath, and why female innkeepers had a poor reputation (e.g. Plato, Laws, X1, 918).

Strabo (xii, 578) professes to know that in an inn in a Phrygian village during an earthquake by night a keeper of girls and a great number of girls were killed, a notice which is interesting, since it appears from this that not only the host himself kept women ready to meet the wishes of his customers, but also that capable and businesslike procurers had their quarters in the inns with their living merchandise, in order to exchange the girls’ flesh for ready money by letting them out for a longer or shorter time to the guests for payment. Conversely, distinguished and especially wealthy guests brought their women with them; if they did not wish to abandon their

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