Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores онлайн

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But the concept of the inter-relationship of the sexes grew into a concept of one primary harmonious principle of aesthetics, of essential perfection of beauty, irrespective of sex and hence irrespective of any compulsive admiration and appreciation of such beauty by one sex or the other. Beauty became an entity in itself, a sexless trait. In the Platonic dialogue, in fact, in the Symposium, the theory is postulated that man was at one time androgynous.

The Greek hetaira or male companion was virtually a prostitute. Sometimes she acquired a more permanent status, when she was bought by a master and became a pallakis or concubine.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, brought no stigma to the boys or young men involved in the practice. Because homosexuality was a corollary, applied in practice, of the primary concept of aesthetic beauty irrespective of sex.

In the case of women, there was the corresponding though possibly not so widespread cult of tribadism.

The Romans cultivated sexuality, particularly in a heterosexual direction, with great vigor and lustfulness. It was largely through the growing consciousness of Rome as an imperial power, and through the increase in industry and commerce, in wealth and consequent luxury and idleness, that perversions of all kinds increased and multiplied to such an abnormal extent that in the first century A.D. the Romans themselves, through their own poets, commented on the situation and contrasted it, with some sense of nostalgia, with the severe and rigid and essentially stabilized moral code that prevailed in the old pre-imperial days.