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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

which recurs in a continually new version as an extremely favourite motive in the literature and graphic art of ancient and modern times. Helios, the all-seeing sun-god, had revealed to Hephzstus that Aphrodite, in the absence of her sooty husband, gave herself up to the joys of love with the imposing and handsome Ares. Full of wrath, he hastens to his workshop, and forges a net with chains so fine, that they are not visible either to mortal or immortal eye. This net he secretly attaches to the nuptial couch, and then apparently takes leave of his wife. The lovers enter the trap set for them. When they are revelling in the sweetest intoxication of love, they suddenly feel themselves ensnared by the cleverly made bonds of the net, so that they are unable to move (Ovid, Avs Amatoria, 583). In this painful position they are surprised by Hephestus, who in great haste calls all the gods of the sky together as witnesses of this base infidelity, and he demands from the father the return of the wedding presents, which he gave him “for his shameless daughter.”

This story, which is not without humour and piquancy, has often been handled in ancient and also in modern literature and has served as a subject for many graceful painters. With justice Ovid could say that no tale was better known in all Olympus than this (Ovid, Amores, 9, 40 : notior in celo fabula nulla fuit). Ovid himself, in his Art of Love (1, 561 ff.), has depicted the painful adventure of Ares and Aphrodite with visible satisfaction as an episode, not without adding several comic features to it: e.g. that Aphrodite made merry with her paramour over the hands and feet of her husband the smith, and mimicked his limping walk.

It has already been mentioned that the cult of the maiden goddess Pallas Athene also was not without an erotic undertone. There is something comic attached to the originally very profound story that Athene was born from the head of Zeus, which had

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