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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

But she calls her sons, the Titans, and demands that they avenge her wounded maternal honour on the father; thus fervent love has become hate that yearns for revenge. But the sons do not venture to lift their hand against the father, and only the wily Cronos declares himself ready. ‘The mother gives him a huge, very sharp sickle. Cronos conceals himself, and when Uranus sinks down to Gea for a nightly embrace of love, Cronos springs towards him from his hiding-place and cuts off his mighty organ of generation, and throws it behind him. From the drops of blood that trickle down, the earth bears the Erinyes, Giants, and Melian nymphs, spirits of revenge, violence, and bloody deeds. The cut-off member itself falls into the sea, and from its white foam, Aphrodite, the charming goddess of love, is born.*

Although religious reformers, like Xenophanes (in Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathem., i, 289, 1X, 193 3 Clem. Alex., Stromata, v, 601) and Pythagoras, again and again pointed out that there was far too much of the human that adhered to the Greek conception of their world of gods, yet this does not appear to have had overmuch success. The people had now once become accustomed to the coarsely sensual conception of its gods, and imagined them to be as its poets described them and as its artists represented them.

The nature of the Greek gods is not the moral, but the zsthetic idea carried through to its extreme consequence, and their peculiar happiness is nothing else but the possibility, clouded by no sickness, no age, and no death, of enjoying to the full a

1 In many handbooks Aphrodite is said to have been born from the foam of the sea; this is, of course, sheer nonsense. In the oldest source of the myth it is stated quite clearly (Hesiod, Theogony, 190): ““ The member was borne a long time over the sea and round it was white foam, which came from the immortal member, and in it the maiden was nourished. The member, which was cut off immediately before the act, was already full of sperm; this now gushes out, and in and with the sea produces Aphrodite.” There is no allusion to the foam or froth of the sea.

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