Byzantinisches Erotikon

In early Byzantium, a largely pagan life attitude clashed with the strict norms of the Byzantine Church. Everyday life, art and literature were still immersed in the refined, naïve sensuality of classical and post-classical Greece. In contrast, the Christian clerics preached asceticism and the renunciation of the pleasures of this world. The gulf was deepening. While the church fathers considered the story of Zeus pouring himself as gold into his beloved Danae to be the height of obscenity, their contemporaries who lived in the real world saw it at best as an apt image of the courtesans’ greed for money.