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

SUPPLEMENT

who quotes the lines (i, 17¢) blames Aischylus for making the Homeric heroes use the extravagancies of his time, but Sophocles in the Assembling of the Acheans (frag. 140; TGF., 162), conjecturally a satiric drama, has also represented the scene and in similar words.

There were other names for the chamber-pot, such as odpdvn, evoupyfpa and odpnyzpis; that for women had a boat-shaped form, hence called oxd¢vov (Aristophanes, Thesm., 633), which passed into Latin as scaphium (Juvenal, vi, 264; Martial, xi, 11). Of pictorial representations mention might be made of a vase in the Berlin Antiquarium, on which is seen a beautiful girl in a Doric chitin, who, with bent head and the forefinger of her right hand outstretched, gives a signal to a youth in the form of Eros, who is hurrying up to her with a fairly large boat-shaped vessel; also, on a wall-painting in Pompeii we see the drunken Heracles with Silenus behind him pissing on his right leg. How dissipated, drunken satyrs use vessels originally intended for other purposes as a chamber-pot, is a fairly common subject of illustration in ancient Greek vase-paintings.

Now and again intemperance at banquets and drinking bouts led to the use of a spittoon, called oxddn or AcBj7w0v. In a fragment of the comedies of Aristophanes (49; CAF., I, 404), a guest asks for a feather with which to tickle his throat, and a spittoon. On vase paintings, youths and men are frequently represented as vomiting.

Also excrements and their repulsiveness are often mentioned in comedy ; the most usual Latin term is cacare, the Greek yélew or xaxxav, the latter being usual in children’s language.

Not without spirit, and in the original having a very drastic effect through the tone-painting, is the description of the act of evacuation in the Clouds of Aristophanes (385 ff.). Socrates is telling Strepsiades that thunder is caused by the clashing

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