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

INTRODUCTION

them courtesans, beautiful boys, or women, while the lamps are still burning. When they have enjoyed themselves sufficiently with these, they fetch young men in their prime, and let them enjoy themselves with these courtesans, boys, or women. They pay homage to love and sexual intercourse, sometimes looking on at one another, but generally letting down curtains from poles fastened on the beds. They are very fond of women, but find more pleasure with boys and young men. These are very beautiful, since they take the greatest care of their persons and remove all troublesome hairs from their body. Among the Tyrrhenians there are many shops for this purpose and well-trained staffs, as in our barbers’ shops. Persons enter these shops and let themselves be treated in any way on any part of the body without troubling about the looks of passers-by.” 2

According to Athenzus (Ath., xii, 519e) the inhabitants of Sybaris were the first who introduced hot baths. At drinking-bouts they made use of chamber-pots, a somewhat disgusting innovation, which, according to a fragment of the comedies of Eupolis (Frag. 351 in Ath., i, 17d; CAF., i, 350), no less a person than Alcibiades is said to have transferred to Athens.

Of the luxury of the inhabitants of the wellknown city of Tarentum, in lower Italy, Clearchus (Ath., xii, 522d; FHG., ii, 306) relates that “ they removed every hair from their body and went about in transparent, purple-bordered garments. After they had destroyed the town of Carbina in Apulia, they dragged all the boys, girls, and young women into the temples and exposed them naked to the

* To understand the passage, we must remember that the shops in ancient times, as even to-day, often in the south, were open to the street. We shall have to deal at greater length with the “ depilation”’ here described, that is the removal of an undesirable growth of hair. We will only here observe that it is less a question of the remoyal of the hair over the private parts (which was certainly regarded as ugly in the case

of the female sex, but was considered a special charm in the males) than of the ugly hairiness of the legs of Greek boys.