EyebrarianPrize winnersGet the app

Books › Aphrodite (ancient manners)

Cover of Aphrodite (ancient manners)

Aphrodite (ancient manners)

Pierre Louys

First published 1925 · 575 pages

A lush, perfumed descent into the hedonistic and tragic world of ancient Alexandria.

Where to buyBooks like this

What it feels like

A decadent, sensory immersion into the opulent world of ancient Alexandria, this novel reads like a languid prose poem dedicated to the worship of beauty and desire. The pace is leisurely, inviting the reader to linger over lavish descriptions of silks, perfumes, and sun-drenched courtyards. Its tone is unapologetically indulgent and reverent toward the flesh, capturing the fin de siecle fascination with a romanticized, pagan antiquity. The mood is heavy with incense and impending tragedy, wrapping the reader in a hedonistic atmosphere that feels both intoxicating and doomed. It is perfect for readers who savor ornate, jewel-toned prose and are drawn to the aestheticized eroticism of French Decadent literature, where every sentence is crafted to seduce the senses.

Mood
  • languid
  • opulent
  • sun-drenched
  • hedonistic
  • perfumed
Tone
  • sensual
  • decadent
  • reverent
  • indulgent
Pace
leisurely
Themes
worship of beauty · sacred and profane love · decadent hedonism · the allure of antiquity
The writing
Lush, ornate, and heavily perfumed with sensory details, reading like a decadent prose poem.
The arc
Moves from a languid celebration of sensual indulgence to a tragic culmination of hubris and sacrifice.
Who it's for
Readers who appreciate fin de siecle decadence, lush historical atmospheres, and the aestheticization of eroticism.
Content notes
  • sexual content
  • archaic attitudes toward sexuality
  • tragic death
  • sacrilege

About the book

This was "the only only complete English version extant" of a novel originally in French about a courtesan living in ancient Alexandria. The book is lavishly illustrated, but is sloppy in other ways. For instance, every time there is a full page illustration (and there are many) the page numbering skips, and the margins of the page are not evenly wide. This is the kind of book that you had to cut the pages with a knife before you could read it.

You could call the story erotica, but it is no worse than The Decameron or Chaucer. It must have been pretty hot reading in 1906.

The book has a page stating "This Edition on Large Paper is limited to 1000 copies of which this is No......" but nobody bothered to fill in the number, so I would guess that more than 1,000 of these were printed.

Description from Open Library.

Books like Aphrodite (ancient manners)

See why they match