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

SCATOLOGY

Persians it was forbidden to spit or make water in another person’s presence (1, 133).

When little children wanted to make water, their mother or nurse said c<tv, if they wanted to relieve themselves, they said piv.

Making water is often spoken of in comedy. Thus in the Clouds of Aristophanes (373) the simple Strepsiades explains rain by the assumption that Zeus is making water through a sieve. In the Lysistrata, the leader of the chorus of old men complains of the women “ who had wetted them with buckets, so that we have to wring our clothes, just as if we had bepissed ourselves ” (402) ; and in the Ecclesiazuse the citizen declares that he will now be on his guard against women, “ that they may not bepiss him” (832). Boys making water are mentioned in the Peace (1266).

The chamber-pot is generally called duis in Greek. At licentious banquets it might happen that a guest cried out to the boy in waiting: “ Bring the chamber-pot!’’ According to a passage in Eupolis (see ante, p. 12) this innovation was fathered upon Alcibiades, while Athenzeus (xiu, 519) ascribes it to the Sybarites.t

According to our ideas, we should hardly consider it possible that this vessel should be even mentioned by serious tragic writers. But A‘schylus had already made Odysseus say: “ Here is the knave who once threw a ridiculous missile at me, the stinking chamber-pot, and did not miss his mark; it hit my head and suffered shipwreck, split into fragments, smelling quite differently from vessels containing perfume ” (frag. 180; TGF., 59). We cannot decide whether this scene occurred in a tragedy, or, as Welcker conjectured, in a satiric drama. Athenzus,

1 A still more tasteless instance is given in Petronius, 27, of the rich upstart Trimalchio. ‘Two castrated boys stood by, one of whom had a silver chamber-pot (matella) in his hand. When Trimalchio snapped his fingers, he put the pot under him. After he had emptied his bladder, he called for water, washed his hands, and dried them on the hair of one of the beautiful boys.

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