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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

many in earlier times attempted to associate the Homeric epithet philommeides (laughter-loving) with the preference of Aphrodite for medea (genitals)! In Paphos, according to Clement of Alexandria, at initiation into the cult of Aphrodite those initiated were handed salt and a phallus. Venus Fisica also, who was specially worshipped in Pompeii, can be most easily explained by the Greek word physis in the sense of genitals.

The myrtle and apple were sacred to Aphrodite ; lovers brought apples as a present or threw them to their loved ones, to show their affection, as Plato tells us in an epigram2 Catullus (Ixv, 19) draws a charming picture of a girl to whom her lover has sent an apple. Half glad, half anxious, she conceals it in her bosom ; when her mother suddenly enters she springs up forgetting the apple, which now rolls down from her bosom and betrays her, while a lovely blush of shame colours the cheeks of the maiden confused by the betrayal of her secret. Thus the apple has a symbolical erotic meaning not only in the biblical legend of the apple of Eve. Among the Greeks this goes back to the story of Acontius (Ovid, Heroides, 20 and 21) who loved Cydippe without finding his love returned. To win her he wrote the words: “I swear by Artemis that I will wed Acontius ” on an apple and threw it to her in the temple of Artemis. Cydippe read the words aloud, but then threw the apple away. Later she fell ill, and being instructed by the oracle that the cause of her illness was the wrath of the offended goddess, she listened to the wishes of Acontius. We may also mention the beautiful but prudish Atalanta (Apollodorus, ii, 106; Ovid, Metam.., x, 560 ff.), who consented to marry none but one

* Hesiod, Theog., 200, explains the epithet as “‘ since she was born from the genitals of Saturnus””. But the verse is spurious, and the explanation due to the grammarians.

* The epigram of Plato is in Diog. Laért., i, 23. On the apple as a symbol of love, cf. the commentators on Theocr., ii, 120; Propertius, 1, 3, 24, and elsewhere ; Aristoph., Clouds, 997.

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