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

EROTIC IN GREEK LITERATURE

favour—then we should have to see in the ““palinode” of Stesichorus the first landmark on the way towards effeminacy, which certainly, advancing slowly but in a victoriously progressive manner through the centuries, finally led to the condition of modern feminism.

Stesichorus had also in a touching and affecting manner employed the motive of unhappy love, in the poem in which he told of the love of the beautiful Calyce, who committed suicide because she had been disdained by her lover, Euathlus. Athenzeus (xiii, 601a) expressly attests that in the poems of Stesichorus the erotic impulse played a great part, and even among the fragments of his poems we find several erotic themes. Thus, he introduced into poetry the figure of the shepherd Daphnis that later became so popular; he was loved by a nymph but found a regrettable end owing to his infidelity. Stesichorus had also celebrated the cruel fate of Rhadina, who, although she was married to the ruler of Corinth, yet refused to leave her beloved Leontichus.

Erotic motives are also common in the poems of Simonides (556-468) and his nephew Bacchylides —and naturally so, since in both of them the myth, whose richness in erotic we earlier discussed in detail, plays a great part. But these motives are so interwoven with the poems, are so much an integral part of them, that an analysis of this erotic would mean an analysis of the individual poems. The same is also true of the poems of Pindar (about 518-442) that are preserved to us. He is the most powerful and the loftiest of all the Greek lyric poets, and we are so fortunate as to possess no fewer than forty-four of his Epimikia ‘These are songs of very different compass, which were composed to celebrate victories at the four great national festivals; they were recited by a chorus, partly on the spot at the meal in honour of the victory, but mostly at home at the solemn entry into the

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