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

SUPPLEMENT

these ceremonies enter the temple. In these days priestesses also are made ; for when flutes have been played and the ceremonies performed, madness comes over many of them, and numbers of those, who came merely to look on, afterwards perpetrate such acts as I will relate. The youth, whose turn has come, having thrown off his garments with a loud shout leaps into the middle of the assembly and lifts up a sword—one of those which I imagine have for many years stood there for the purpose. Having grasped the sword he immediately castrates himself and runs through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. From whatever house into which he throws it he receives a female dress and adornments.’ ‘This is what took place at castrations. When the enthusiastic intoxication of self-emasculation was past, many oblations were offered by those castrated to the “ great mother ” such as cymbals and kettledrums, the knife with which the unholy deed was executed, and “the fair hair, which the youth before then threw back so proudly’. Thus it is attested in an anonymous epigram in the Anthology (vi, 51), as well as in other authorities.

Although this orgiastic cult is of Asiatic origin, yet, like the kindred worship of Rhea Cybele, it early reached Greece, though in a milder form, so that self-emasculation can only have been very rare, if, indeed, it ever actually took place.

Self-emasculation could be carried out for other reasons, as has been described by Wieland—who certainly deviates from the ancient authorities—in his Combabus (Leipzig, 1824).

Lucian had had the following account given him of the priests of the “ Syrian Goddess”’. When Stratonike, the wife of the Assyrian King, undertook a pilgrimage for building a temple, the king wished to assign his intimate friend Combabus to her as protector. In vain the young man, who owing to his youth was afraid of being alone for a long time

508