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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

Persephone, for which he has to languish in the underworld in everlasting fetters (Horace, Odes, iii, 4, 79). In accordance with the outrageous lust of their origin the race of centaurs are of wildest sensuality, ever longing for woman’s flesh and entering into the most extravagant adventures in a perpetual state of intoxication. Especially wild were the scenes in the poets and plastic artists at the frequently described wedding of Peirithous and Hippodameia (//., i, 262 ff. ; Od., xxi, 294 ; Hesiod, Shield, 178 ff.; Ovid, Metam., xii, 146 ff.), when the guests got tipsy with wine and the sight of the beautiful bride. The wild centaur Eurytus grasps at the breasts of Hippodameia, and endeavours to handle her lustfully in other ways, whereupon, as the Odyssey relates, his nose and ears were cut off and he is thrown out, while according to the more usual version the fierce battle between the Lapithe and centaurs begins, which ends with the victory of the Lapithe.

We have already (pp. 150, 204) made the acquaintance of Phzedra in circumstances recalling Potiphar’s wife of the Old Testament. The story of Stheneboea, the wife of Proetus, the ruler of Tiryns, is similar. She fell madly in love with the beautiful young Bellerophon ; but as she could not seduce him, her pretended love changed into a fierce thirst for revenge. “Either you must die,” she said to her husband, ‘‘or else slay Bellerophon, who seeks the flower of my body.” Proetus is weak enough to believe the slanders of his shameless wife, and sends the pure-minded lad to his brother-in-law in Lycia with a letter, written in secret characters, in which he asks him to put the bearer of it to death. But the wicked plot did not succeed ; rather that journey to Lycia becomes for Bellerophon the beginning of great heroic deeds. It is interesting, that in many vase paintings the Uriah-letter is dedicated to the young hero in the presence of Stheneboea, who still strives to make love to him

228