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

PERVERSIONS OF GREEK SEXUAL LIFE

scenes in ancient Greek literature. ‘This is a fresh proof of the healthiness of Greek life again and again emphasized by the author who, however, would have little difficulty in quoting a few passages concerning them from Roman literature.

The story of Heracles and Omphale shows a masochistic character. The mighty hero becomes the slave of the Lydian queen Omphale, in whose service he so far humbles himself as to perform female tasks, while Omphale, clad in the lion’s skin, looks on at him. Yet here we can hardly speak of masochism properly so called, since its special characteristic, the sensation of sexual pleasure felt by the sufferer, is nowhere emphasized in the story of Heracles and Omphale.

Also in the story of Demetrius of Phalerum, who bore on different parts of his body the evident scars of bites of the hetaira Lamia, not only is the express assurance that these bites had made Demetrius amorous wanting in Plutarch (Demezr., 27), but it is in itself improbable.

6. Sodomy

Sodomy as, according to a completely false, but now naturalized definition, the intercourse with animals is named, is not seldom mentioned in Greek antiquity, but either only in fables and romances, or, as in the Sicilian herdsmen of Theocritus, as an occasional makeshift.

Of sodomitic stories I mention: Zeus approaches Leda as a swan, Persephone as a snake; Pasiphaé falls in love with a bull and has intercourse with it, and the fruit of this passion was the Minotaur, ‘“an ox that was half a man, a man that was half an ox,” as Ovid calls him (Ars am., 11, 24). being dominated, even to the extent of violence or cruelty, by one of the other sex. Its opposite is Sadism (from the Comte de Sade), which

is a form of sexual perversion specially marked by cruelty—Tvranslator’s note.

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