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

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

a decline but an advance of their civilization, in that it created for them intellectual values which last beyond all ages and ever provoke us anew to amazing astonishment.

Terpander had composed songs for girls’ choruses, which were afterwards brought to the greatest degree of excellence by the greater Aleman or Alcmzon (about 650 B.c.). He deserves the credit of having promoted the musical development of the Spartan maidens. The relations between the poet and his singers, to whom he offers occasional homage in his poems, appear to have been personal and intimate, as might easily have been the case, considering the freer mode of life of Spartan maidens.

Equally as scanty as the fragments of the poems of Aleman are those of the Sicilian, Stesichorus, who flourished about 600 B.c. According to Plato (Phedrus, 243a; cf. Bergk, PLG., III‘, p. 218) he had written an abusive poem on Helen’s adultery, in consequence of which he was punished by the enraged heroine with the loss of his eyesight, which he did not recover until he wrote the famous “ palinode”’, according to which it was not Helen herself, but an image created by Zeus that followed the seducer Paris to Troy and thereby became the cause of the Trojan war, so rich in sorrow; while the true Helen was carried away to Egypt. It is obvious that the story of the blinding of the poet and his healing by Helen cannot have been the true reason of the “ palinode”, which is indisputably attested. If, therefore, it cannot be believed that the poet thought himself obliged to explain an accidental and temporary affection of the eyes as an act of revenge on the part of the heroine, which is more than improbable, it must be assumed that the pressure of public opinion, for Helen was a cultgoddess in Dorian belief, compelled Stesichorus to recall his abuse of her, however strongly it might have been founded on tradition. If this explanation is correct—and every probability is in its

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