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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

with languishing, lustful glances (for the story of Bellerophon see J/., vi, 150 ff.). ‘Two ideal forms of manly youth are the brothers Castor and Pollux (Polydeukes). Leda was considered to be their mother, with whom it was said that Zeus himself had cohabited in the guise of a swan. Poets and plastic artists of ancient and modern times never tired of representing this motive in ever renewed variations. Mythology gives different accounts as to the sequel; in the most common version Leda bore an egg, from which the two Dioskuroi (sons of Zeus) were born; they grew up to be a pair of brothers in whom everything that, according to Greek ideas, is an ornament to the young man, was united, so that one may say in a word that in them the ideal type of youth was to be seen.! Among the love adventures of the two brothers the rape of the daughter of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux is sufficiently well known from poetry and plastic art.2 The same may be said of the abduction of the Phoenician king’s beautiful daughter, Europa, by Zeus. Near Sidon he saw her gathering flowers in a blooming meadow, whereon, inflamed with love, he changed himself into a bull, entices her upon his back, and carries her away through the sea to Crete.

Less known, although also a frequent motif of poetical and plastic art, is the story of the sisters, Procne and Philomela, although its details are variously told. In the sobbing notes of the nightingale the Greek heard a melancholy lament ; therefore the nightingale was to him originally a beautiful maiden, Philomela, who had suffered grievously and was changed by the compassionate gods into a bird. She was wedded to a man who longed for her sister, whom he, pretending that his wife was dead, violated. But Philomela learns the truth and threatens revenge, wherefore he cuts out her tongue

__.’ For Zeus and Leda see especially Eurip., Helena; cf. Apollodorus, i, 126 ff. ; for sculptures, O. Jahn, Archéologische Beitrége, pp. 1-11.

* Theocritus, xxii, 137 ff. ; Pindar, Nemea, x, 60 ff.; Ovid, Fasti, Vv, 699 ff. On representations in plastic art cf. Pausanias, iii,17, 3; 18, rr.

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