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

SUPPLEMENT

assert that castration was certainly not unknown to the Greeks, but that it was carried out by them only with extreme rarity. The fine feeling of the Hellenes strove against such barbarism, and they did not value, as was the case in the East, the effects of castration, which are thus described by Lucian : ‘But those wretched and unhappy creatures, that they may be longer boys, do not even remain men, a doubtful riddle of a double sex, who have neither preserved the nature in which they were born nor possess that into which they have changed; for them the flower of youth withers prematurely ; they are reckoned at one and the same time among children and old men, without having passed the interval of manhood. So that cursed luxury, that teacher of everything that is bad, thinking out shameless pleasures one after another, plunges into that disgraceful disease that cannot be mentioned, in order that it may leave no kind of vice untried ’’ (Amor., 21).

Certainly we have a counterpart in Xenophon which expresses a very different opinion. In the Cyropedeia (VII, v., 60 ff.) Cyrus comes to the conclusion that there can be no more faithful or trustworthy friends than eunuchs. I need not go more closely into this highly interesting train of thought, as it would lead to a discussion not of Greek but of Oriental ideas.

Befote carrying out the exercise of love, “ infibulation’ was very common in Greece. The prepuce, or foreskin, was drawn forward over the extremity of the penis and securely tied with a string or narrow band. This was intended to prevent the glans from being exposed to injury in the event of the prepuce slipping back during gymnastics or other active exercises.

If satyrs especially appear on vase-paintings ‘‘infibulated ”’, this is generally intended as a joke, as a kind of ‘‘ girdle of chastity’, if it may be so expressed. Among the Romans, as is often

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