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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

and keeps her concealed. By means of an ingenious dress, in which she expresses her story by the aid of inwoven figures and signs, she is able to inform her sisters, after which in revenge they cut the little son Itys (Itylos) in pieces and set him before the father to eat. When he discovers the horrible truth he pursues the sisters with an axe, and they are all changed into birds—Tereus, the father, into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow, Philomela into the nightingale (the story of Procne and Philomela in the version of Sophocles, Tereus (in Nauck, T7GF?, p- 257 ff.).

Less ghastly is the story of Ion, whom the Attic king’s daughter Creusa had borne after a secret amour with Apollo. She exposes the babe in the same grotto where she had yielded to the god, but the latter has pity upon the helpless child and brings it to Delphi, where it is brought up by the priestess and grows to be a blooming youth. In Ion we have, once more, the ideal type of the wonderful youth, adorned with every gift of mind and body, in which Greek literature and art abounds. From a servant of the temple he becomes its superintendent, and guardian of its valuable treasures.

In the meantime, Creusa had married Xuthus, but they had no children ; wherefore the disappointed couple consult the oracle, and receive the answer that he who first meets them when coming out of the temple shall be their son. After many complications all is beautifully cleared up, and Xuthus recognizes Ion as his son. The story was told by Sophocles in his lost Crewsa (fragments in Nauck, TGF?, pp. 199 and 207), and then by Euripides in the wonderful, still extant drama Jon. Greek heroic legend proper also abounds with erotic motifs, so that in this case also we must impose limitations upon ourselves.

The mightiest of all the Greek heroes is Heracles. When Alcmene is shortly to become the mother of Zeus’s favourite son Hera, tortured by gnawing

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