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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

Cephalus, Orion, Tithonus (Tyrtzeus frag., 12, 5 ; Hom. Hymn., v, 218 ff.; Horace, Odes, 11, 16, 30). The last named, who was so beautiful that his beauty became a proverb, seems to have pleased her most, and for him she obtained by entreaty from Zeus the boon that he should be deathless and live eternally. But, unfortunately, the queenly Eos omitted to ask also that he should be endowed with eternal youth ; so when, in her palace by the farthest floods of Ocean, grey hairs and decrepitude came upon Tithonus, Eos wearied of him and discarded him. The fable, almost modern in tone, is symbolical of the ever renewed young day and morning, which, at first fresh and beautiful, as it were dries up and becomes old under the increasing heat. The symbol is also repeated in the sun; Memnon (Od., x1, 522), according to Homer the most beautiful of all who fought before Troy, falls by the hand of Achilles, whose dear friend Antilochus he had slain. Therefore still to-day (?) the pillars of Memnon, set up near Egyptian Thebes in honour of his memory, utter a note of melancholy when the tender mother Aurora ascends the sky and with her first beams gilds the image of her son.

That Selene (Luna), the moon-goddess, the ‘beaming eye of night’, was also of an amorous nature, hardly needs special mention. She had once rested in the arms of Zeus, to whom she bore the beautiful Pandia. In Arcadia Pan was regarded as her sweetheart who, according to Virgil (Geor. iii, 391), had won her love by the present of a flock of white lambs. But best known of all is her love for Endymion, the beautiful youth whom _ she surprised while he slept in the wooded hills of Latmos, and after that blessed him every night with her love. Some recognize in this the symbol of the sleep of death, into whose darkness the gentle light of love still penetrates. Licymnius (frag. 3 in Ath., xiii, 564c) of Chios had indeed written that Hypnos, the god of sleep, had fallen madly in love

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