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

EROTIC IN GREEK LITERATURE

Phylarchus (in Parthenius, 15 and 31) introduced the subject of the beautiful but coy Daphne, who was loved by Apollo, but, praying to escape the violence of the god, was changed into a laurel. He had also told of Dimecetes, who found by the sea the washed-up corpse of a very beautiful woman and for a long time had sexual intercourse with her. When that was no longer possible, he buried the corpse and committed suicide.

Love stories are found in great numbers in the collections of local stories that sprang up almost everywhere, especially in the Ionic towns of Asia Minor. ‘The local stories of the luxurious city of Miletus especially were so rich in erotic themes that Aristeides, the Greek Boccaccio, who lived about the beginning of the first century B.C., called his collection of erotic stories in at least six books, mostly of an indecent character, Milestan Tales. The great popularity enjoyed by these children of a lascivious muse is clear from the fact that they were translated into Latin by Cornelius Sisenna (fragments in Bucheler’s Petronius (ed. 3, p. 237)), and also from a notice in Plutarch, according to which a copy of the work was found in the baggage of one of Crassus’s officers in the Parthian war (53 B.c.) (Plutarch, Crassus, 32). ‘These tales have not been preserved, but we can imagine them to be of a kind resembling those in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. The story already told by us (p. 43) of the bride-bath in the Scamander may have been a Milesian Tale.

If we may consider the famous story of the Matron of Ephesus to be a Milesian Tale, then one of their ever recurring themes was to prove that no woman was so modest that she could not be sometimes madly inflamed with adulterous love for a paramour, as Eumolpus says in Petronius, who relates the story in the following form (Petronius, 111): “A certain lady at Ephesus was so famous for her chastity, that all the women from the neighbouring

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