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

Epic POETRY

2. THe Epic Cycle

In the Cdipodeia it was told how Laius, the father of Cédipus, fell desperately in love with the beautiful Chrysippus, the son of Pelops, and finally carried him off by violence. Pelops uttered a fearful curse against the robber (p. 134).

The Little Ihad (Ihas Parva (see Kinkel, Epicorum Grecorum Fragmenta, Leipzig, 1877, p. 41, frag. 6) ) of Lesches treated as an episode the rape of Ganymede (J/., xx, 231; v, 266), the young son of the Trojan King Laomedon, upon whom Zeus bestowed as a recompense a vine fashioned of gold by the art of Hephzestus, while in Homer Ganymede is a son of King Tros, who receives a pair of thoroughbred horses as a recompense.

The rape of Ganymede is described in the fifth of the so-called Homeric Hymns (v, 202 ff.) in still greater detail.

3. Hesrop In his S/ield of Heracles (57) the poet Hesiod had told of the struggle with Cycnus which Heracles had to endure. He summons his favourite and brother-in-arms JIolaus, who was “by far the dearest of all men to him”. The length of the conversations between them prevents their being given here ; their tender language and their whole tone prove that already Hesiod, as all later writers, considered JIolaus to be, not only the companion-in-arms, but also the favourite of the hero. From a fragment we learn that Hesiod himself loved a youth named Batrachus (Suidas, in Kinkel —see above—p. 78), on whose early death he had

written an elegy.

4. PHANOCLES At a time which cannot be accurately defined, Phanoclest had composed a garland of elegies

_” Philetee Coi Hermesianactis Colophonii atque Phanoclis reliquiz disposuit, emendavit, illustravit Nic. Bachius (Halle, 1829); cf. Preller, Phanokles und die Mythologie der Knabenliebe (Rhein. Mus.,

N.F. iv, 1846, pp. 399-405), and the article Phanokles in ErschGruber. 463