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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

who could defeat her in racing. Milanion, who loved her, spread golden apples on the racecourse, and as Atalanta lost time in picking them up, she was thus conquered by her lover. Miulanion had received these apples as a present from Aphrodite.

In the animal world the goat, the ram, the hare, the dove, and the sparrow are sacred to Aphrodite because of their amorous nature. Hence the ram often appears on coins of Cyprus; an Aphrodite Epitragia, riding on a goat, was not only known in Athens, but in Elis an Aphrodite on a goat was seen from the master hand of Scopas (Pausanias, vi, 25, 2). Doves were kept in large flocks in many temples of the goddess, especially in Cyprus and Sicily, an Oriental custom the last traces of which we see to-day in the doves on the square of St. Mark in Venice, whither the cult of doves came from Constantinople. That married couples are especially fond of feeding the doves of St. Mark is the last, although somewhat faded, offshoot of the cult of Ishtar that was once so flourishing, as we can still recognize by the language, for the foreign word peristera, the Greek name for dove, means “ the bird of Ishtar’. In Apuleius (Metam., vi, 6) Venus appears in a magnificent car drawn by four white doves, and accompanied by sparrows and other birds. Sappho (frag. 1, 10) makes the goddess ride along in a car drawn by sparrows, for the sparrow, owing to its amorously sensual nature, belongs to the escort of Aphrodite.

The lovable form of the god Hermes is also influenced by erotic ideas. Thus we have already had occasion to speak of the ithyphallic Hermes (p. 130 f.); and his image is often found together with that of Aphrodite, of which Pausanias (11, 19, 6; vi, 26, 5; vill, 31, 6; cf. Plutarch, Precepta Conjugalia (ad init)) gives several examples. Something originally naive is attached to the god of flocks and herdsmen, which frequently rises more or less to coarseness in his continual intercourse

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