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

SUPPLEMENT

makes the six sons of Aolus live with their six sisters in peaceful marriage.’

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that incest in a dream, even of the homosexual kind, was not by any means uncommon, at least if we may conclude from the detailed manner in which it is described and explained in the dream-books.

6. ScATOLOGY

The term scatology, usually employed in modern sexual science, comes from oxap (gen. cxards), dirt, excrement. [he unappetizing secretions of the human body, even the excrements themselves have an attraction for children and even for older people, who indeed all their life remain children, to a much greater degree than many imagine. ‘The chief places where scatalogical wishes are made known and fulfilled, are the public conveniences, the walls of which are even to-day sometimes besmirched with coarse or erotic inscriptions and drawings. ‘That it was the same in ancient Greece, is of itself intelligible, although we cannot of course prove it in detail. But the essential difference between the two periods is that scatology then found its open expression in literature and art, and not merely in furtive pornography as to-day. As may be easily understood, most instances of scatology occur in comic and satiric poetry, although serious passages concerning the process of secretion of the human products of matter are not wanting, e.g. the already mentioned instructions of the honest peasant-poet Hesiod on making water.

Similarly Herodotus informs us that among the

1 Incest between father and daughter is occasionally found as a mythological motif, as in the story of Harpalyce, who is violated by her father and wreaks a terrible vengeance upon him (Parthenius, 13), or the horrible tale of Mycerinus and his daughter (Herodotus, ii, 131) : cf. also Lysias, Alcibiades, i, 41. Aristophanes (Wasps, 1178) mentions an unknown Cardopion, who lived in incest with his mother.

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