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

FLAGELLATION, SADISM, MasocHISM

Tyche that stood before the Prytaneum. He kissed and embraced it, then ran raving and half-crazy with desire to the councillors and begged them to sell him the statue for money. When his offer was refused, he adorned the statue with bands, garlands, and valuables, offered sacrifice and killed himself after unceasing lamentation” (Var. /ust., iX, 39).

ee to Pliny (xxxvi, 22), Alcetas, a youth of Rhodes, fell in love with a naked statue of Eros by Praxiteles, at Partum on the Hellespont.

5. FLAGELLATION, SADISM, MASOCHISM

Flagellation is usually combined with religious motives, since a naive or overheated state of mind believes that one performs a work that is especially well-pleasing to the gods if he voluntarily humiliates himself by flogging his body or even by partial self-mutilation. Thus are to be explained the floggings and castration already discussed, which formed part of different cults, such as the noisy orgiastic festivals of Cybele (see pp. 215 ff.). This self-emasculation has found its literary expression in numerous epigrams of the Palatine Anthology.

That such cruelties, however strange it may at first sound, finally have their reason in the desire for sexual excitement, has been proved by modern sexual science, whereby the connection between religion and sexuality finds a new and surprising confirmation. From this prime cause I also thought I could explain the well-known chastisement of Spartan boys at the altar of Artemis Orthia, to which the chastisements of the girls at the feast of Dionysus called Scieria at Alea in Arcadia form a counterpart, as also the already mentioned (p. 130) festival of the “ unholy Aphrodite ”’.

I have nowhere found sadistic or masochistic *

1 Masochism is derived from the name of Leopold yon SacherMasoch, who described the perversion, and added the termination -ism. Dunglison’s Medical Dictionary (1893) gives the following definition : “ Sexual perversion, in which a member of one sex takes delight in

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