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

INTRODUCTION

the youth, admired by all for his beauty, bore on his coat of arms (A?h., xii, 534e) an Eros hurling the lightning. Diogenes Laértius (iv, 49) said of Alcibiades that “ when a young man he separated men from their wives, and, later, wives from their husbands”; and, similarly, the comedian Pherecrates (frag. 155 ; CAF., 1,194): “ Alcibiades, who was formerly no man, is now the man of all women.” +

In Sparta he had committed adultery with Timea, the wife of King Agis, which, indeed, according to Athenzus (xii, 5355), he explained as not being due to lustful, but to political motives. According to the same author, he was accompanied on his campaigns by two of the most famous courtesans at that time.

The historian Clearchus (AZh., xii, 541¢; FHG., ii, 307), in his Biographies, wrote of Dionysius the Younger, the tyrant of Sicily: “ When Dionysius reached his mother-city Locris, he had the largest house in the city filled with wild thyme and roses, then sent for the young women of Locris one after the other, stripped himself and them naked, and rolled on the bed with them, practising every kind of obscenity imaginable. Shortly afterwards, when the insulted fathers and husbands had got the wife and children of Dionysius in their power, they forced them to commit indecencies before the eyes of all, and abandoned themselves to every kind of conceivable debauchery. After they had satisfied their desires they drove needles under their finger-nails and put them to death.’ Strabo (vi, 259; cf. Aelian, Var. hist., ix, 8), with a few alterations, tells the same story, adding that Dionysius set doves with clipped wings flying about the banqueting-hall, which had to be caught by the naked girls, some of whom were obliged to wear sandals that were not pairs, on one foot a low, on

1 According to Suetonius (fulius Cesar, 52) Curio had said the same of Cesar; cf. also Cicero, Verres II, 78, 192.

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