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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

refined sensuality, beauty, grace, and joy to the bottom of the cup. Schiller’s words “ At that time nothing was sacred but the Beautiful” are in fact the key to the understanding of Greek mythology and at the same time of Greek life generally.

One must hold fast to this conception of the nature of the godlike, if we desire to face the countless erotic adventures of these gods with impartiality ; further, one ought not to forget that the land of Greece was divided into many small lands each of which had its own local stories. Obviously, it is not the task of our book even to try to mention all these local stories; we put together the most important erotic motives of the Greek mythology, without even making an attempt to attain completeness.

We begin with Zeus, the supreme god of light, the father of gods and men. At the bottom of the numerous marriages and amours of the god, lies the idea of the fructifying moisture of the sky, which was naturally forgotten in course of time ; in addition many distinguished families traced back their origin to him with intelligible vanity. Finally, of all this only the erotic kernel remained, and thus Zeus appears as the suitor and benefactor of a simply incalculable number of mortal and immortal women and girls, which again not only gives innumerable poets and artists ever new motives for floridly sensual inventions, but also lays the foundation of the continually renewed jealousy of his wife and sister, Hera; and all the more when Zeus, by carrying off the beautiful Trojan royal boy, Ganymede, sanctioned the love of boys in the airy heights of Olympus. We have spoken before of the jealousy of Hera, and if we regard the countless amours of Zeus from the moral standpoint as acts of adultery, we can hardly reproach her for it. Neither does poetry become tired of glorifying the marriage of Zeus and Hera with all the enchantment of poetry. In religious cults this wedding was celebrated in

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