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

RELIGION AND Erotic

Beyer, in his essay (Fabule Grace quatenus quave aetate puerorum amore commutate sint : Diss. I, naug.., Weida, 1910) on the homosexual fables of the Greeks, eumerates no fewer than nineteen favourites of Apollo, in which list he has omitted Ileus once mentioned by Hesiod (frag. 137 (Kinkel)). Hyacinthus has been already spoken of ; here it may be added that pictorial art also seized upon the motive of Hyacinthus loved by Apollo, otherwise by Zephyrus, with special partiality, as several vase paintings preserved to us attest. Also among the poets, especially of the Alexandrian period, the love of Apollo and Hyacinthus enjoyed great popularity.

That Apollo, as a lover of manly youth, was also worshipped as its ideal type and patron-god, is easy for anyone who has penetrated the nature of Greek homosexuality to only a moderate extent to understand. Hence his image was always to be found by the side of Hermes and Heracles in every Greek gymnasium.

Plastic art represented Apollo as a bright, beautiful, youthful form, and repeats this motive in countless variations, of whichsuch numbers have come down to us that we need not speak of them here. But I should like briefly to discuss a representation, one of the most charming, since it does not appear to me to have been hitherto correctly interpreted.

We read in Pliny (Nat. fist., xxxiv, 70) in his list of the bronze works of Praxiteles : “ He also created an Apollo between the ages of boyhood and youth, who 1s lying in wait, with a dart in his hand, for a lizard creeping up the branch of a tree ; he is called Sauroktonos (the lizard-killer).”” = Now several Statues are preserved to us which represent a naked, delicate, somewhat girlishly formed boyish man, who is supporting his left hand on the trunk of a tree, up which the lizard is running, against which he is lifting up his right hand ; the best copies of these are in the Vatican and the Louvre. It is further known that the lizard, as an animal loved by the sun,

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