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

CASTRATION, CIRCUMCISION, INFIBULATION

lustful purposes; nothing of the kind is, indeed, known of the Greeks, but it is of the Medes who, according to Clearchus (Ath. xii, 514d), “ castrated many of those who lived round about to excite lust’.

That sexual impulses—which, of course, are centralized in the brain and not in the sexual organs —were by no means extinguished by castration was well known to the Greeks, as is shown by an epigram of Straton (Anth. Pal. xii, 236) where a eunuch who kept a whole harem of boys is spoken of.

In Philostratus (Vit. Ap., i, 33) we read: “Eunuchs also have feelings of love, and the yearning desire kindled in them through the eyes is by no means extinguished, but remains hot and ardent.”

Castration was occasionally performed on women in order to make them barren. Certainly here also it is not a question of Greece proper. Thus Xanthus in his Lydian History informs us the “ the Lydian King Adramyttes was the first who had women castrated, in order to use them instead of male eunuchs”” (Ath., xii, 515¢). The passage is not quite clear, but it may be conjectured that it is a matter of the removal of an ovary, whereby women may be rendered incapable of conceiving.

A note in Strabo (xvii, 284)—“ that the Egyptians circumcise new-born children and take out the female part, as is also the practice of the Jews ”’seems to have a different meaning; the reference here is evidently to a circumcision of the foreskin of the clitoris, a custom which still prevails among some Arabian, Coptic, ASthiopian, and Persian and Central African tribes. This circumcision was, perhaps, quite a reasonable proceeding in some cases, as ‘“‘ among African women the clitoris ae be prominent and of importance as a cutaneous

ap.

As the result of what has been stated we may

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