Aphrodite, Pierre Louÿs [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗

THE temple of Aphrodite-Astarte was erected outside the gates of the city in an immense park full of flowers and shadowy places where the water of the Nile, brought through seven aqueducts, nourished at all seasons a prodigious verdure.

This flowering forest at the edge of the sea, these deep brooks, these lakes, these somber fields, had been created in the desert more than two centuries before by the first of the Ptolemies. Since then, the sycamores planted by his orders had become gigantic; under the influence of the fecund waters the lawns had grown into meadows, the pools had enlarged into lakes; from a park Nature had evolved a vast region.

The gardens were more than a valley, more than a region or country; they were a complete world enclosed by boundaries of stone and ruled by a goddess, the soul and center of this universe. All around rose a circular terrace, eighty stadia long and thirty-two feet high. This was not a wall, it was a colossal city made of fourteen hundred houses. An equal number of priestess-courtesans inhabited this sacred city and represented in this unique place severity different nationalities.

The plan of these sacred houses was uniform and as follows: the door, of red copper—the metal dedicated to the goddess— bore a knocker and striking-plate shaped symbolically; and beneath was engraved the name of the occupant with the initials of the usual phrase:

U. X. E.

KOKhLIS

P. P. P

On each side of the door opened two rooms in the form of shops; that is to say: without a wall on the side of the gardens. That on the right, called “the exposed room” was the place where the bedecked priestess reposed upon a high seat at the hour when the men arrived. That on the left was at the disposition of visitors who wished to pass the night in the open air without, however, sleeping on the grass.

Through the opened door a corridor gave access to a vast, marble-paved court, the center of which was occupied by an oval pool. A peristyle shaded this great spot from light and protected by a zone of coolness the entrance to the seven rooms of the house. At the back rose the altar which was of rose-granite.

Each woman had brought from her own land a little idol of the goddess, and, placed upon the domestic altar, she adored it in her own tongue without ever understanding the others. Lakmi, Ashtaroth, Venus, Ishtar, Freia, Mylitta, Kypris; such were the religious names of their deified Pleasure. Some venerated her under a symbolic form; a red boulder, a conical stone, a great spiny shell. Most of them set up on a pedestal of soft wood a coarse statuette with thin arms, heavy breasts and excessive hips. They laid at its feet a branch of myrtle, strewed the altar with rose leaves, and burned a grain of incense for each prayer that was granted. It was the confidant of all their sorrows, witness of all their labors, supposed source of all their pleasure. At their death it was put into their fragile little coffins as a guardian of their entombment.

The handsomest of these girls came from the kingdoms of Asia. Every year, vessels which brought to Alexandria the presents of tributaries or of allies, disembarked, with the bales and the leathern bottles, an hundred virgins chosen by the priests for the service of the sacred garden. These were Mysians and Jewesses, Phrygians and Cretans, girls from Ecbatana and from Babylon, from the shores of the Gulf of Pearls and from the sacred banks of the Ganges. Some were white of skin, with medallion-like faces and firm bosoms; others, brown as the earth under the rain, wore golden circles in their nostrils and shook dark masses of short hair upon their shoulders.

Some came from farther yet, little beings, slender and slow, whose language no one knew and who resembled yellow monkeys. Their eyes lengthened toward the temples; their straight black hair was fantastically dressed. These girls remained all their lives timid as lost animals. They knew the pretenses of love but refused to kiss. Between visitors they might be seen playing together, and, seated upon their little feet, amusing themselves childishly.

In a separate meadow the blond and rosy daughters of the North lived in a troop, lying upon the grass. There were Sarmatians with triple plaits, with robust limbs and square shoulders, who made themselves crowns with branches of trees and wrestled to divert themselves; Scythians, flat-nosed, full-breasted, hairy; gigantic Teutons who terrified the Egyptians by their hair—pale as that of old men—and with flesh softer than that of children;

[paragraph continues] Gauls with hair red as that of cattle, who laughed without cause; modest young Celts with sea-green eyes.

Elsewhere, the brown-skinned Iberians met during the day. They had masses of heavy hair that they dressed cleverly. Their firm skins and strong physiques were much fancied by the Alexandrians. They were chosen for dancers as often as for mistresses.

Under the wide shadow of the palms dwelt the daughters of Africa: the Numidians veiled in white, the Carthaginians draped with black gauzes, the Negresses enveloped in multicolored costumes.

There were fourteen hundred.

When a woman entered there she never went forth again until the first day of her old age. She gave to the temple the half of her gains and the rest sufficed for her repasts and her perfumes.

They were not slaves, and each one actually possessed one of the houses of the terrace; but all were not equally popular, and the luckiest ones often found means to buy neighboring houses which their inhabitants sold in order to save themselves from starvation. These latter then transported their statuettes into the park and sought an altar made of flat stone, in a corner which they left no more. The poor merchants knew this and preferred to visit those who dwelt thus exposed to the wind upon the moss near their sanctuaries; but sometimes even these men did not present themselves, and then these poor girls united their miseries in couples—devoted friendships which became lasting love, households where all was shared, to the last woolen rag, and where alternating complaisances consoled for long chastities.

Those who had no woman-friends offered themselves as voluntary slaves to their more fortunate comrades. It was forbidden that these should have in their service more than twelve of the poor girls; but twenty-two courtesans were known who had attained the maximum and had chosen a variegated household from among all races.

If by chance a woman had a son, he was brought up in the temple close to the contemplation of the perfect form and to the service of his divinity. If she were delivered of a daughter, the child was born for the goddess. The first day of her life, her symbolic marriage with the son of Dionysos was celebrated. Later she entered the Didascalion, the great monument-school where the young priestesses learned, in seven classes, the mysteries of the temple. The pupil chose at will the day of her initiation because an order of the goddess must not be thwarted; this day she was given one of the little houses on the Terrace, and