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

THE GREEK WOMAN

retains the best, to avoid marrying to the malicious joy of his friends”, as he expresses it both wittily and with psychological truth. For, as he goes on to say: ‘‘a good wife is a very precious possession, but a bad one is the worst torment, who as it were is only a parasite in the house and even exhausts the resources of a well-to-do husband and hands him over to a needy old age.”

It is very significant that already this still entirely naive and simple peasant had looked very deeply into the nature of woman. It is a matter of less importance that he also attributed all the evil in the world to a woman, the silly and vain Pandora (Works and Days, 47), who, having been amicably received by Epimetheus opens her box and pours out from it all evil upon humanity, for here the poet was under the spell of mythological tradition ; but it is of great weight and of extraordinary interest for the history of morals that he feels obliged to warn female vanity in impressive words against coquetry, against such girls as seek to increase the charms of their hinder parts by coquettish movements (Works and Days, 373), and consequently do their utmost to lure the man with that part of the body which the Greeks especially prized in the young man, so that Lucian (Amores, 14, ta radia vépj) can venture to call the posteriors generally by the name of “ parts of the youth”’. That such a method of charming her husband being employed by a wife should be found in the naively simple poet of the shepherd’s calendar is worthy of notice, and proves that even in those early times, as generally at all times, the woman was conscious of possessing the means which seldom, if ever, failed in their effect upon the sensuality of the man. Hesiod (Works and Days, 582) also knows that the season of the year and temperature are not without influence on sexual life: “ When the artichoke flowers and the chirping cicada, perched upon a tree, pours down its shrill song continuously from beneath