Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates
RELIGION AND EROTIC
once depends upon the marvellous plastic art with which these forms of the body are worked out from the zsthetic point of view, and also to the naive, one may say the entirely innocent, joy with which the goddess regards these charms.
A work of the most ardent, naked sensuality produces its effect as perfect beauty without causing any painful impression, since it combines with the plastically unsurpassable form the naive joy at the possession of this beauty.
Among no other people has the esthetic pleasure in the charms of kallipygia left so dominating an impression and found its expression in art and literature. We read in Athenzus (xii, 544c) of the two beautiful daughters of a countryman, who were chosen in marriage by two brothers on account of their beautiful buttocks, and were always called thereafter Kallipygoi (‘‘ with beautiful buttocks’) by the citizens. Also,as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his iambics, there was a pair of Kallipygoi at Syracuse; and they, having obtained considerable means by their marriage, set up a temple of Aphrodite, and called the goddess Kallipygos, as Archelaus also tells us in his iambics.+
The goddess of beauty is at the same time the goddess of love. She is the queen of souls, she subjects every element to her, she can unite that which is at variance. But she not only makes love worth craving for and institutes it amongst men and gods: she herself blesses many, both mortals and immortals, with her favour. She presents her favourites with every imaginable happiness, bestows upon them beauty and youth, riches and power, joy and charm. So Cinyras, already known to Homer (J/., xi, 20) as first king of Cyprus, who was, according to Pindar (Pythia, 11, 15), when a boy the favourite of Apollo. He was also
1 A similar but more detailed story is told of the dispute between two girls, Thryallis and Myrrhine, in the letters of Alciphron (i, 39). similar subject occurs also in Anth. Pal. (v, 35-6, attributed to Rufinus ; cf. v, 54, 55) 129).
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