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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

Aphrodite is best known as the goddess of female beauty and love. Poetry and plastic art revel in equipping the goddess with ever fresh charms. She is the gold-adorned, the smiling-sweetly ; embellished with a costly diadem she wears the seductive girdle, in which all the enchantment of love is contained, devotion, longing, and infatuating passion. Homer already knows the famous girdle, which, he adds, even infatuates the mind of the wise. Especially glorious are her large, moistly gleaming eyes, her delicate neck and bosom, her sweet mouth, which the poets compare to a rosebud: in short, all imaginable charms are found united in their goddess of love by the Greeks. These charms are enhanced and emphasized by her magnificent raiment and brilliant adornment, and the poets are regularly intoxicated by the lovingly painted description of all those delights. In the goddess even that portion of the human back which, in present-day good society, is unnameable, is endowed with fabulous charm; a fact whichthanks to the lack of foolish prudery among the ancient Greeks—does not seem so very wonderful. Only in Greece could the idea have occurred to one to build temples and set up statues to a goddess in order to glorify that practically unmentionable part, but there, from one end of the country to the other, the Greeks worshipped their “ Aphrodite Kallipygos’, the goddess “ with beautiful buttocks”.

Any visitor to the famous Museo Nazionale in Naples who enters the little room named Veneri in the east wing of the ground floor, will see in the centre of the room, set up on a revolving pedestal, the statue of a Venus, exquisitely bare. Coquettishly she lifts up her dress and throws a backward glance over her shoulder at her charms, which she looks at almost caressingly with a mingled satisfaction of tenderness and pride. This position denotes the culminating point of refined erotic, without, however, causing a painful or even indecent effect. This at

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