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

RELIGION AND EROTIC

34; Plutarch, Theseus, 21; Schol. Homer, J/., Xvili, 590; Od., xi, 321). That Theseus was more than susceptible to the love of women is sufficiently well known, so that we need not give the names of his numerous loves. (On his multitudinous amours, cf. Plutarch, Theseus, 29; Ath., xiii, 557@.) ‘The historian Istrus (Ath., xiii, 557@), a pupil of Callimachus, in his Attic Stories, had spoken of the amours of Theseus, and distinguished three classes of them : some were due to ‘‘ love’, others ‘‘ since he had captured them for booty ”’, thirdly “ legitimate marriages’.

The story of the Argonauts and other tales of the heroes, so as far as they are of an erotic character, can only be briefly recorded. First, it is not uninteresting to find that in Greek story a kind of rejuvenescence treatment was already known. (Cf. Argum. Eurip., Medea; Schol. Aristoph., Kmghts, 1321; Clouds, 749; Ovid, Metam., vii, 242 ff.) When Medea came with Jason from the Argonautic expedition into Greece, she renewed the youth of her husband, who had become too old, by the fairly vigorous method of boiling him. She proposed a somewhat similar treatment for her very aged father A‘son, who had become decrepit, boiling magic herbs in a golden kettle and giving him the liquor to drink ; though in this case the decoction was too strong, so that the poor old man, according to some authorities at least, died after drinking it. Similarly, she rejuvenated the Nisean nymphs, the nurses of Dionysus, by bringing them again together with their husbands, which proves that the clever Medea was acquainted with the last and most effective means of producing such a result.

How Medea later takes a fearful revenge on her supposedly faithless husband, and how, inflamed by boundless jealousy and inextinguishable hatred, she kills her two beloved children and succeeds in killing her rival by an infernal trick, is known from ancient and modern poetry and plastic art.

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