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

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the instrument which furious married women made use of to teach their husbands manners. ‘This method was the more practical, since slippers at all times were at the disposal of the woman shuffling along in sandals, while had she wanted to use a stout stick she would have been obliged to hunt for one, for the Greek wand was merely the light, pithy narthex (parsley) stalk, the tropics not having at that time imported bamboo canes.

‘Thus it is understandable that married women were often called empusae (Aristoph., Frogs, 293, and Scholiast, Eccles., 1056; Demosthenes, xviii, 130, and Scholiast) or lamiae (Apuleius, Metamorph., i, 17, V, 11), by which names, as is well known, phantoms like vampires were intended (one of whose legs was of bronze, the other of asses’ dung) or ugly old women—hags.

In Greek public opinion no kind of reason could be found for blaming a man who, tired of the eternal monotony of living with his wife, sought a welcome change in the arms of an intellectually stimulating and agreeable courtesan, or knew how to improve the triviality of every-day life with the small-talk of a beautiful boy. Infidelity, as we call it, can never have been spoken of by an ancient Greek, for in his day it had never occurred to a husband that the idea of marriage connoted the renunciation of zsthetic enjoyment, and still less would the wife have expected such a sacrifice from him. ‘The Greeks are, therefore, not more immoral, but more moral, than we are, since they recognized the polygamous tendency of the man and acted accordingly, and also passed judgment on the action of others in the same way, while we, in spite of possessing the same knowledge, are too cowardly to draw the conclusions, and, satisfied if only the outer appearance is preserved, sin in secret so much the more. At the same time it ought not to be forgotten that there were also some among the Greeks, certainly very few and

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