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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

one, and where she shows herself the wild animals of the mountain ranges follow her and fawn upon her, and give themselves up to the sweet impulse, as the Homeric hymn says (iv, 69 ff.). In spring took place most of the festivals in honour of Aphrodite, which were held by night, in blooming gardens and bowers, with dances, music, and unbridled abandonment to love, “the sweet gifts ot gold-adorned Aphrodite.”

Especially luxurious were these love-feasts on the island of Cyprus, the incomparably charming island, breathing perfumes of flowers that bloomed there in luxuriant magnificence, myrtles, roses, anemones, pomegranates, etc., all of which owed their growth to Aphrodite.

The festival commemorated her birth from the sea and on the strand of Paphos, where she had first set foot on the blissful island, the people gathered together to receive the goddess and to escort her to her sacred gardens in festive jubilation. The image of the goddess was bathed by women and girls in the holy sea and afterwards bedecked, after which they themselves bathed in the river under myrtle bushes in preparation for the coming orgies of love. (Concerning this feast at the Cypriote Paphos, cf. Ath., iii, 84c¢ ; Strabo, xiy, 683; Ovid, Metam., x, 270 and Fasti, iv, 133; A‘schines, ep. 10.)

Such festivals of Venus were celebrated everywhere in sensuality-loving Greece, being especially luxurious at Cnidus on the coast of Asia Minor, where Aphrodite had a distant sanctuary, thus described by Lucian (Amores, 12): “No sooner had we approached the temple, than breezes of Aphrodite blew to meet us. The floor of the vestibule was not, as elsewhere, laid out with dead, smooth stone slabs, but—as was quite natural in the temple of Aphrodite—completely planted with living trees and shrubs, which with their magnificent leaves and flowers combined to form a luxuriant

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