Pierre Louys’ ‘Aphrodite’- successor to ‘Bilitis’

a 1950 US edition

Sexuality and religious prostitution are at the core of Pierre Louys’ second novel published in 1896, Aphrodite.  The story concerns a courtesan called Chrysis and her life in the market for pleasure of the classical world.  Chrysis is originally from Galilee; she is nearly twenty in the story and has been in Alexandria for the last eight years.  She works as a courtesan, but her sexual preferences are lesbian.  We learn in chapter one that “Greek harlots [had] taught her strange caresses which surprised her at first, but afterwards enchanted her so much that she could not do without them for a whole day.”

Chrysis describes her teens in these terms:

“All who have desired me have had their pleasure upon me: men, young men, old men, children, women, young girls. I have refused nobody, do you understand? For seven years, I have only slept alone three nights. Count how many lovers that makes. Two thousand five hundred and more. I do not include those that came in the daytime. Last year I danced naked before twenty thousand persons…”

In Louys’ vision of this ancient world, sensuality and the beauty of the human nude are worshipped.  Louys offers what he claims to be an honest and unexpurgated representation of Greek culture under the Ptolemies, one which is full of dancing girls, juvenile nudity and diverse and taboo-free sexuality.  It may revive the true nature of the classical world in Alexandria; it is certainly titillating and scandalous.  The classical setting seemed to be used to excuse the scenes of nakedness and uninhibited sexual experience.

By transposing the scene of events to a distant time and place, Louys managed to diminish some of the potential distastefulness of his subject.  The prostitution he described could be framed as the alien customs of an exotic people and so render it less shocking.  According to Louys, in Ptolemean Egypt courtesans were associated with and trained in the temple of Aphrodite.  Sex is an act of worship to the goddess. If the women became pregnant and-

“they were brought to bed of a daughter, the child was consecrated to the goddess. On the first day of its life, they celebrated its symbolic marriage with the son of Dionysos, and the Hierophant deflowered it herself with a little golden knife; for virginity is displeasing to Aphrodite. Later on, the little girl entered the Didascalion, a great monumental school situated behind the temple, and where the theory and practice of all the erotic arts were taught in seven stages: the use of the eyes, the embrace, the motions of the body, the secrets of the bite, of the kiss, and of glottism.

The pupil chose the day of her first experiment at her own good pleasure, because desire is ordained by the goddess, whose will must be obeyed. On that day, she was allotted one of the houses of the Terrace, and some of these children, who were not even nubile, counted amongst the most zealous and the most esteemed.

The interior of the Didascalion, the seven class-rooms, the little theatre, and the peristyle of the court, were decorated with ninety-two frescoes designed to sum up the whole of amatory teaching.”

Louys imagined one scene in which a girl dedicates herself to Aphrodite:

“There remained before the altar only a blushing little child who had occupied the last place in the procession. She held nothing in her hand but a little crocus wreath, and the priest scorned her for the poverty of her offering.  She said:

“I am not rich enough to give you silver coins, O glittering Olympian goddess. Besides, what could I give thee that thou lackest? Here are flowers, yellow and green, pleated into a wreath for thy feet. And now…”  She unbuckled the clasps of her tunic; the tissue slipped down to the ground and she stood revealed quite naked. . . “I dedicate myself to thee body and soul, beloved goddess. I desire to enter thy gardens and die a courtesan of the temple. I swear to desire naught but love, I swear to love but to love, I renounce the world and I shut myself up in thee.”

Melitta, by Edouard Zies

We meet one of these temple prostitutes, a girl of ten and a half called Melitta.  She has sex with a man called Demetrios, who is to become involved in a fateful relationship with Chrysis.  Melitta is still only a little girl, as he discovers:

“completely naked, and when divested of her ample robe, her little body was seen to be so young, so infantine in the breast, so narrow at the hips, so visibly immature, that Demetrios felt a sense of pity, like a horseman on the point of throwing his man’s weight upon an over-delicate mare.”

She persuades him to stay and demonstrates the skills in love that she has learned in the temple school:

“Here the conversation took a less serious if not a more silent turn, and Demetrios rapidly perceived that his scruples were beside the mark in the case of so expert a young lady. She seemed to realise that she was somewhat meagre pasturage for a young man’s appetite, and she battled her lover by a prodigious activity of furtive finger-touches, which he could neither foresee nor elude, nor direct, and which never left him the leisure for a loving embrace. She multiplied her agile, firm little body around him, offered herself, refused herself, slipped and turned and struggled. Finally they grasped one another. But this half hour was merely a long game.”

Demetrios, in fact, is not the only one who enjoys the pleasures of Melitta’s young body.  She too knows Chrysis.  The latter visited her once with a male partner; another time she came by herself to enjoy the little girl alone, and she has promised to return a third time.

Melitta & Demetrios by Edouard Zier

Chrysis, in fact, has many female partners (as she acknowledged in the earlier passage).  Amongst these are two Ephesian flute players, girls called Rhodis and Myrtocleia.  They are in their early teens and are a couple; they hope in due course to confirm their love by marrying. Louys later described this [imaginary] Greek ceremony in song 53 of The Songs of Bilitis:

“The wedding feast was given in the morning, in Acalanthis’ house whom she had taken for a mother. Mnasidika wore a milk-white veil, and I the virile tunic. Then after, in the midst of twenty women she donned her festal robes. Perfumed with bakkaris and spread with gold-dust, her cool and rippling skin attracted furtive hands. In her leafy chamber she awaited me, as a bridegroom. And I led her out in a little two-wheeled cart, seated between me and the nymphagogue ( the matron who accompanied the bride to her husband’s home). One of her little breasts burned in my hand. They sang the nuptial song: the flutes sang madly. And carrying Mnasidika, my arms beneath her knees and round her shoulders, I passed the threshold, strewn with blushing roses.”

Louys was very far ahead of his time here, treating same sex marriage as if it had been a matter of fact in the ancient world. Equally, when Mariette Lydis illustrated an edition of the songs in 1948, her depiction of the married couple (as well as her scenes of female lovers generally) was still very radical.

The married couple by Mariette Lydis

We first meet Rhodis and Myrtocleia returning home after they have played at a debauched banquet. Myrto praises her lover’s body:

“When I look at you and when I see myself, I know not why you love me in return. Your hair is as fair as ears of corn; mine is black as a ram’s fleece. Your skin is as white as shepherd’s cheese; mine is brown as the sand upon the beach. Your tender breast is as flowered as the orange tree in autumn; mine is meagre and barren as the rock pine. If my face has gained in beauty, it is because I have loved you. O Rhodis! well you know that my singular virginity is like the lips of Pan eating a sprig of myrtle; yours is the colour of roses, and dainty as the mouth of a little child. I do not know why you love me; but if you ceased to love me for a day; if, like your sister Theano who plays the flute by your side, you ever stayed to sleep in the houses that employ us, then I should never even think of sleeping alone in our bed, and when you came in you would find me strangled with my girdle.”

The couple then reflect on the orgy they have witnessed- and escaped.

“They made both of you dance, you in this Cossian robe, transparent as water, and your sister naked with you. If I had not protected you, they would have possessed you like a prostitute, as they did your sister before our eyes in the same room. Oh, what an abomination! Did you hear her cries and wailings? How dolorous is the love of man!”

Frank J Buttera, 1936

Indeed, at a later banquet they attend, Theano is physically abused and then bodily picked up by the male diners and dipped head first into an immense vat of wine. Reflecting further on what they have seen, the couple conclude:

“We must tell Theano that our bed is no longer hers. We will make her up another one beside the door. After what I have seen this night I cannot embrace her again. Myrto, it is really horrible. Is it possible to love like that? Is that what they call love?”

“Yes, it is that.”

“They deceive themselves, Myrto. They do not know.”

Myrtocleia took her in her arms, and both kept silence together. The wind mingled their hair.”

Antoine Calbet, 1896

Despite their mutual devotion, the two young lovers also share Chrysis’ bed: “catching sight of the two forgotten Ephesian girls upon her bed, she leaped into their midst, separated them, hugged them with a sort of amorous fury, and her long golden hair enveloped the three young heads.”  They are still there late the next afternoon: “She had slept all day between the two Ephesians, and, but for the disorder of their bed, they might have been taken for three sisters together. The Galilæan’s thigh, bathed in perspiration, rested heavily upon Rhodis nestling up against her hostess. Myrtocleia was asleep upon her breast, with her face in her arm and her back uncovered.”

Myrto & Rhodis by Edouard Zier

As for the rest of the story, Chrysis is pursued by Demetrios and she agrees to become his lover, on condition that he steals a number of precious items for her. This sets in chain a series of tragic and fatal events that culminate with Chrysis’ arrest and execution. It is Rhodis and Myrtocleia who bury her.

Aphrodite followed the classical revival theme he had set in the Songs of Bilitis, Louys’ first book. It also indicated the themes that were to obsess him for the entirety of his career, whether in published works or in the manuscripts that were only discovered and published after his death (such as the poems in Pybrac).

See too my separate discussions of the artwork inspired by the book Aphrodite, and the numerous illustrated editions that have been published (well over a dozen, with plates supplied by such artists as Clara Tice, Paul-Emile Becat, Mariette Lydis and Edouard Chimot), as well as my consideration of the other works that drew upon the novels by Louys: plays, operas and song cycles. For more detail of the writing of Pierre Louys, see my Bibliography for him.