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

INTRODUCTION

greatest pleasure in sensuality, wedded many women, and begat children with many maidens. His numerous intrigues with boys—Iolaus, Hylas, Admetus, and others, are not mentioned. F urther, Heracleides reminds us that Heracles during his lifetime greatly enjoyed the pleasures of the table ; that throughout Greece bubbling warm springs were called Baths of Heracles, and, indeed, that specially soft and voluptuous beds bore the trade mark Heracles. What, he thinks, could be the origin of all this, if Heracles had despised voluptuousness ? It was very bad taste on the part of the poetsfollowing Homer and Hesiod, to represent Heracles, this pronounced gourmand and voluptuary, as if he ran about all his life long with his tree-trunk club, his bow, and lion’s skin.2

In the twelfth book of his Banquet of the Learned, Athenzus gives a detailed account of the luxury and sensual manner of life of antiquity. After some theoretical observations on feasting and debauchery, beginning with the Persians, he discusses the individual peoples of ancient times, informing us how each of them knew how to fill life with luxury and voluptuousness; he then enumerates an imposing list of men in Greek history who had led a specially refined sensual life. It is not uninteresting to find that not a few of these are known to us as leaders and heroes of the Greek people. Much will be said later on this subject ; here we may mention some points specially characteristic of the Greek conception of sensual life.

According to Heracleides (Ath., xii, 514b ; FHG., ii, 95), the Persian King had a harem of three hundred women. “ They slept during the day, that they might be awake during the night, which

? Greek mythology gives the names of fourteen of his boy-loves cf. R. Byer, Fabule Graece quatenus quave aetate puerorum amore commutate sint, Leipziger Doktorarbeit, 1910, pp. 9-24).

* The worthy Megacleides was perhaps not so far wrong; at least in comedy Heracles appears only as the typical voluptuary who enjoys every imaginable kind of sensual pleasure. The oldest poet who describes him only as the sorely tried sufferer and man of sorrows was Stesichorus.

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