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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

jealousy, is clever enough to extort an oath from Zeus that the son born on a certain day shall be the mightiest of rulers. She then hurries to Argos, where one of her friends was seven months gone with child, and,in her character of goddess of birth, hastens this birth and keeps back the labour pains of Alcmene, so that Eurystheus is born before Heracles.1 Since Zeus, in spite of his rage, is obliged to keep his oath, the feeble coward Eurystheus becomes ruler of Argos and forces Heracles to become his servant. Heracles is persecuted all his lite by Hera with such raging hatred as only the pitiful jealousy of a mean woman, untouched by any noble elevation of mind, can entertain, and, guiltless as he was, is obliged, through unspeakable troubles and labours, to atone for Zeus having, when he was born, lengthened the delights of love for three nights by not allowing the sun to rise one day. But cunning is met with cunning; Zeus succeeds in inducing Hera to lay the new-born child on her breast, which it sucks so vigorously, that she throws it from her, and the divine milk is spilled around in a wide arch, and thus the Milky Way in the firmament was formed (Diod. Sic., iv, 9; Pausan., ix, 25, 2). When he was 18 years old, according to a local story of Thespiz, he slew a mighty lion. To lie in wait for the monster, he spent the night as the guest of king Thestius, who had fifty daughters, one of whom was more beautiful and more amative than the rest. But Heracles would not have been Heracles, if he had not blessed them all with his love in a single night. Although the fifty daughters of Thestius are properly the nymphs of the country, so that here also the allegory of the nature-myth is clearly recognizable, yet the older mythographers were satisfied to see in this night of love a conspicuous proof of the unusual vigour of

_ * For how Hera delayed the labour pains of Alcmene, see Ovid, Metam., ix, 280. She sent the Pharmakides to her—evil spirits who had that

power. According to Pausanias, ix, 11, 3, likenesses of them had been seen in Thebes.

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