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

RELIGION AND ERoTIC

Through his twelve deeds, which in local poetry were increased by several others, Heracles had become the brilliant national hero of the Greeks and was looked up to with holy enthusiasm, especially by manly young men. Even more ignominious appears the state of servitude, far worse than with king Eurystheus, into which Heracles sank at the luxurious court of the Lydian queen, Omphale, where the glorious hero experienced the most insulting treatment imaginable according to Greek ideas, for he became, as we have seen, not only the slave of a woman but effeminate himself.

As Heracles is the hero of the whole Greek nation, so Theseus is the national hero of the Ionic stock. On the way from Trezene, where he had spent his life as a boy, to Athens, he performs six mighty heroic deeds, which every reader should know from childhood. When going through the city to visit his father as a tender youth in trailing Ionic dress with hair elegantly tied up, the workmen engaged in building a temple ridicule this seeming girl who is roaming about alone; whereupon the hero hurls a wagon loaded with building material so high into the air that all are astounded and ridicule ceases.

When Theseus had delivered the seven Athenian boys and girls (p. 117) who were doomed to be sacrificed every ninth year to the Minotaur in the labyrinth at Crete by slaying the monster, great jubilation and nothing but rejoicing prevailed. ‘To the sound of songs and lutes, adorned with garlands of joy and affection, Theseus dances with Ariadne, and the rescued boys and girls, in memory of the windings of the labyrinth, perform the artistically intricate “ cranes’ dance”’, the forms of which were preserved till the latest times in the island of Delos, where Theseus landed after he had abandoned the sleeping Ariadne on the island of Naxos (Lucian, De Saltat.,

Theseus, 35. The Athenians were hence called dadyAoutor (with small rump); cf. also Arsen., Viol., 64. For the Salamis-arse cf. Aristoph., Knights, 785.

233