Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/137

Rh easily able to gratify their sexual impulses. (Des Hallucinations, 1862).

"The laws of Manu," continues Havelock Ellis, "attibute to women concupiscence and anger, the lave of bed and and of adornment. The Jews attribute to women greater sexual desire than to men. This is illustrated, according to Knobel (as quoted by Dillman), by Genesis, chapter 3, verse 16.

"In Greek antiquity,……in love between men and women the latter were nearly always regarded as taking the more active part. In all Greek love-stories of early date the woman falls in love with the man, and never the reverse, Æschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. Euripides emphasised the importance of women. 'The Euripidean woman who falls in love thinks first of all: "How can I seduce the man I love?"' (E. F. M. Benecke: Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, 1896).

"The most famous passage in Latin literature as to the question of whether men or women obtain greater pleasure from sexual intercourse is that in which Ovid relates the legend of Tiresias (Metamorphoses, 3, 317-333). Tiresias, having been both a man and a woman, decided in favour of women.……In a passage quoted from a lost work of Galen by the Arabian biographer, Abut-l-Faraj, that great physician says of the Christians 'that they practice celibacy, that even many of their women do so.' So that in Galen's opinion it was more