But furthermore, it would seem that the genius of peoples, like that of individuals, is above all sensual. All the cities that have reigned over the world, Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Venice, Paris, have by a general law been as licentious as they were powerful, as if their dissoluteness was necessary to their splendour. The cities where the legislator has attempted to implant a narrow, unproductive, and artificial virtue have seen themselves condemned to utter death from the very first day. It was so with Lacedæmon, which, in the centre of the most prodigious intellectual development that the human spirit has ever witnessed, between Corinth and Alexandria, between Syracuse and Miletus, has bequeathed us neither a poet, nor a painter, nor a philosopher, nor an historian, nor a savant, barely the popular renown of a sort of Bobillot who got killed in a mountain defile with three hundred men without even succeeding in gaining the victory. And it is for this reason that after two thousand years we are able to gauge the nothingness of Spartan virtue, and declare, following Renan’s exhortation, that we “curse the soil that bred this mistress of sombre errors, and insult it because it exists no longer.”
Shall we see the return of the days of Ephesus and Cyrene? Alas! the modern world is succumbing to an invasion of ugliness. Civilization is marching to the north, is entering into mist, cold, mud. What night! A people clothed in black fills the mean streets. What is it thinking of? We know not, but our twenty-five years shiver at being banished to a land of old men.
But let those who will ever regret not to have known that rapturous youth of the earth which we call ancient life, be allowed to live again, by a fecund illusion, in the days when human nudity, the most perfect form that we can know and even conceive of, since we believe it to be in God’s image, could unveil itself under the features of a sacred courtesan, before the twenty thousand pilgrims who covered the strands of Eleusis; when the most sensual love, the divine love of which we are born, was without sin: let them be allowed to forget eighteen barbarous, hypocritical, and hideous centuries.
Leave the quagmire for the pure spring, piously return to original beauty, rebuild the great temple to the sound of enchanted flutes, and consecrate with enthusiasm their hearts, ever charmed by the immortal Aphrodite, to the sanctuaries of the true faith.
Pierre Louÿs.
BOOK I
I
CHRYSIS
She lay upon her bosom, with her elbows in front of her, her legs wide apart and her cheek resting on her hand, pricking, with a long golden pin, small symmetrical holes in a pillow of green linen.
Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered bed ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.