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

SUPPLEMENT

in festivals and theatrical performances, in short, everywhere sexuality is the predominant component. Erotic is hence the key to the understanding of Greek culture generally, consequently the knowledge of Greek erotic is the indispensable assumption for a deeper knowledge of the life of ancient Greece. Hence the need and the object of the present work —to fill a no longer endurable gap in our knowledge of the Hellenic people.

But if erotic is the prime cause of old Greek culture and the centre of Hellenic life, with convincing force there logically results the further knowledge, that the attitude of the Greeks towards erotic as something that was a matter of course was naive and natural, to an extent that seems to us to-day scarcely conceivable. As the word “ sin ” is foreign to the tongue of the Hellenes, so their “morality”? was only concerned with what was unjust to others, with offences against the State, and with crime. ‘To the Greek “ morality” had no bearing on the problems of sexual life, except in so far as these reacted on immature boys or girls or when, in sexual matters, violence was employed. Otherwise, everyone among them had the right of disposal of his own body; what men who had passed the age of puberty did together, at that time troubled neither the judge nor public opinion: hence no one could take offence if sexual matters were spoken of with the greatest frankness and without any pretence of embarrassment.

The astonishingly perfect understanding of beauty possessed by the Greeks, of their Dionysiac joy in the glory of the human body, ennobled for them every act of sensuality, if only it was based upon true love, that is, on the yearning after beauty.

Hence, for them, pzederasty, instead of a vice was but another form of love which they regarded, not as the enemy of marriage, but as a necessary supplement to marriage recognized by the State ; and it was publicly spoken of with just as much

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