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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

described in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite with great poetical beauty and sensual fire, also belongs to the Trojan circle of legends. The fruit of this bond of love is A‘neas, who during his life, rich in happiness and unhappiness, enjoys the lasting protection of Aphrodite, until upon the fall of his native city, and after long wanderings and adventures, he finally becomes the ancestor of the Julian family in the land of Italy.

When Aphrodite makes herself mistress of the hearts of men and inflames them with love there is no resisting her, no choice is left them, and the goddess then becomes a she-devil who infatuates women, so that, though they are often conscious of doing wrong, they are powerless to resist and yield themselves to the sweet passion. Thus, in the Iliad, Helen already appears infatuated by her; so also Medea, who in her raging love for Jason, forgetting all duty to parents, brothers and sisters, home and her paternal roof, follows the handsome stranger to Greece; and finally, being scorned by him, becomes a fearful demon of hatred and revenge and sacrifices her two dear children. The devilish power of Aphrodite was next fated to be experienced by the three Cretan women Ariadne, Pasiphaé, and Phzedra, whose fate with inexorable cruelty shows how far raging love can go and to what despair love can lead: Ariadne the type of the forsaken mistress, Pasiphaé the victim of unnatural lust, Phedra the typical example of despised love transformed into murderous hate. These women and many others were fated to learn from Aphrodite the meaning of that love which Euripides afterwards described in a long fragment of an unknown play,* in which among other things he said, that it is death and irresistible power, raging madness and hot desire, bitterness and torment, the greatest power of nature, but also the mother of all that is

1 In Stobeus, Flor., 63, 6, where the verses are attributed to Sophocles ; but cf. Nauck? on Soph. Frag. 865.

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