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

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

“No one feels offended if urged to take food and live; and even this lady, hungry after fasting several days, at last allowed herself to be dissuaded from her obstinate resolve, and refreshed herself as greedily as the other with the food, the sight of which had previously overcome the girl.

“Well, you know what it is that a man wants, when he has eaten and drunk his fill! With similar flatteries to those with which the soldier had persuaded the lady no longer to want to die, he now attacked her modesty. The youth did not appear to her ugly and ill-bred, and the girl loyally supported him, for, indeed, the life that he had reawakened in her pleased her very well, and she cried to her virtuous lady: ‘Will you ever obstinately withstand yourself? You love, and does your love flatter you? O do not pile sorrow on sorrow! He who has consoled you, madam, lies here !

“Why need I keep youlonger? You know perhaps, how rapid is the passage from sadness to love? The lady no longer abstained from food and the conquering soldier soon persuaded her to give up the other kind of fasting also.

“So they not only passed this night together, enjoying in it all the delights of marriage, but also the next and the following day. Of course they shut the doors of the vault, so that any acquaintance or stranger who came to the monument might think that the most chaste woman on earth had given up the ghost on her husband’s body ; also, of course, the soldier was delighted, both with the lady’s beauty and with his stolen pleasure, and he bought the best he could afford, and carried it at nightfall into the vault.

“When the relatives of the crucified men observed that there was no longer any guard present they got down into the vault at night and performed the last obsequies, while the soldier was sleeping on the bosom of his beloved and without being seen by him. At daybreak he noticed that one of the crucified

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