Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates, стр. 329

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

their sexual extravagances. Thus he had directed one of his poems against Belestiche, the mistress of King Ptolemy II (285-247 B.c.) to whom the king, according to Plutarch (Amatorius, 9; Moralia, 7 53h, and 11), had erected a temple as Aphrodite Belestiche. In an obscene verse he ridiculed the king’s marriage with his sister Arsinoé, whence his name Philadelphus. The king was most deeply offended, and for a long time caused the poet to languish in prison, from which he finally managed to escape, but his escape was only temporary and he was again captured on the high seas by one of the admirals of the king, who ordered him to be thrown into the sea in a leaden chest.

Cleomachus, a boxer from Magnesia, if we may believe Strabo (xiv, 648a), fell in love both with a cinedus and with a girl who was kept by him, and was consequently induced to attempt a representation of these characters in dialogue form. The realistic trend of Hellenistic poetry and its preference for the genre pictures of every-day life favoured the development of the mimus, already spoken of (p. 154). Of the original mimes by a Sophron and others nothing worth mention has been preserved ; of that which has come down to us the already highly conventionalized mimes of Theocritus take the first place. The place of bucolic, that is herdsmen’s poesy, in the history of Greek literature and an appreciation of Theocritus do not belong to our task. We have only, as far as it is possible, to do with a brief record of the erotic in the thirty longer poems of Theocritus that we possess, to which may be added forty-four epigrams. For their extensive homosexual content we refer to a later chapter. Hardly one of the Theocritan poems is free from erotic ; hence we can only mention what is most important, and must ask the reader to complete what is here said by reading the poems himself. In the first, in amcebzean (1.e. alternate) verse, the unhappy love of Daphnis, the chief hero

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