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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

beautiful. Yet even after death those who are seized by such devilish love still find no rest, since according to Virgil (Ainezd, vi, 444 ff.) those who are unhappy in love wander restlessly on lonely paths in a myrtle grove in their own part of the underworld.

Such power is not only inherently founded in the character of Aphrodite, but she owes it also to the charm of love, whose inventor the Greeks considered her. As Pindar (Pythia, iv, 214 ff.) says, Aphrodite brought the iynx to Jason, ‘“‘ and taught him the lore of suppliant incantations, that so he might rob Medea of reverence for her parents, and that a longing for Hellas might lash her with the whip of compulsion while her heart was all aflame.”

Also the forsaken girl in Theocritus (ii, 17 ff.) makes use of this love-charm to exorcise her faithless loved one. Tynx is the Greek name for the wry-neck (zynx torquilla, a woodpecker), and the restless play of colours on its shimmering neck symbolized the restless movement and undulations of the emotions of love. ‘To make the charm effective the bird was “ stretched upon a four-spoked coloured wheel ”, that is, fastened by its feet and wings to a fourspoked wheel, after which the wheel was rapidly turned round.

Naturally, Aphrodite not merely awakens the desire of love, but brings it to fulfilment. The Greek was not even ashamed of “ the sweet gifts of Aphrodite”, as their poets call it; and so quite consistently the sensual enjoyment of love finds its expression in their opinion of the nature of the goddess and in her cult. Once we realize that sexual indulgence is a duty divinely ordained, the institution of religious prostitution—a custom at first difficult for us to understand—becomes intelligible. We need here only mention it, since it has been discussed in detail in the chapter dealing with purchasable love in Greece. The same holds good of Aphrodite as the goddess of hetaire, while we have already

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