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

CHAPTER VI

PERVERSIONS OF GREEK SEXUAL LIFE

How healthy the sexual life of the Greeks was is shown by the fact that those manifestations of sexual phenomena usually grouped together under the name of Psycopathia Sexualis played an extraordinarily small part in it. This assertion would not be just if homosexuality is reckoned as sexual psychopathy ; but that this—at least for Greek homosexuality—is not allowable the previous chapter will have proved.

But there was no lack of the perverted forms of love in old Greece also, and their scientific representation may be justly demanded from the author of a sexual history ; yet I may here be allowed to be brief, since well-known books by Rosenberg, Bloch, Vorberg, and others have already collected a quantity of material.

1. Mrxoscopy ?

Even as the name of this perversion is not ancient Greek, so the thing itself, which consists in stimulation and satisfaction by the secret observation of sexual acts, was so rare in Greece, that I can quote no passages in proof of it; whether any pictorial representation of a voyeur (those addicted to such practices) exists I am unable to say. When Candaules, as mentioned before, finds pleasure in showing his wife naked to his friend, we can only speak of mixoscopy in a wider sense, since it is not Gyges who desires to enjoy the sight, but the husband who tempts him to do so, whether it

1 From ptés (sexual union) and cxoz-, the stem from oxémrew, to look at.

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