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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

great quarrel-scene at the end of the first book of the Thad, where Zeus ends the quarrel with the words : “ «Sit then quietly and obey my command! Otherwise all the other immortals in Olympus will hardly protect thee, when I come near, and whenever I lay my invincible hands upon thee.’ Thus he spake, and majestic-looking Hera was afraid, and sat silent curbing her stubborn soul” (J/., i, 565 ff.).

Of the further scenes of wedded discord between Zeus and Hera described by Homer (J/., xv, 18 ff.), we may mention the one in which Zeus suspends his wife in the sky, so that she hovers freely in universal space, with a heavy anvil on each foot. Probus (Ecl., 6, 31) had already explained this singular scene cosmologically, in that in the anvils he saw earth and sea and in the whole a picture of the highest god, who keeps the air and everything that exists in a state of suspension.

As she herself is faithful to her husband, she expects the same from all married men, and becomes the patron-goddess of marriage.

As fire had come down to men from heaven, so Hephaestus, the god of fire, was regarded as the son of Zeus and Hera. His lameness, in which men thought they recognized “‘ the shaking, flickering flame”, was explained in a story told us by Homer: that Zeus, when Hephzstus once took his mother’s part in a quarrel, seized him by the foot and flung him down from Olympus. Hence his legs remained weak; to support them, he made two girls of gold (J1., xviii, 410 ff.), “ like youthful living maidens,” which, however, were endowed with life and animation. The nape of his neck is sinewy, and his breast, which he keeps bare like a smith, is covered with shaggy hairs.

In the Lemnian story his wife is Aphrodite, but as, according to another story, she is the wife of Ares, that story easily arose which the bard Demodocus (Od., viil, 266 ff.) recites to the Phzacians with gleeful satisfaction and abundant raciness, and

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