INTRODUCTION

A fragment from a (now-lost) play entitled A Picture by the poet Alexis features a certain Cleisophus of Selymbria, who got himself locked into a temple at Samos intending to have intercourse with the statue it housed. ‘[A]nd since he found that impossible on account of the frigidity and resistance of the stone (διά τε τὴν ψυχρότητα καὶ τὸ ἀντίτυπον τοῦ λίθου), he then and there desisted from that desire and placing before him a small piece of flesh (προβαλλόμενός τι σαρκίον) he consorted with that.’

One might want to take this curious incident simply as what it purports to be: the product of the poetic imagination of an important advocate of Middle and New Comedy. Alternatively we might consider that the key to this odd passage is to be found in a more general but no less puzzling association between women and food in Athenaeus’ Deiphnosophistae, the work in which it is preserved. In short it might indeed be tempting to dismiss this episode as a strange but ultimately negligible incident but for the fact that Cleisophus’ desire was by no means as singular as one might think. The entire story reverberates with other instances of agalmatophilia (‘statue love’) involving divine statues, and the similarities and differences between Cleisophus’ experience and their accounts of agalmatophilia are as striking as they are revealing.