Herodotus on Lust

The account of mutual abductions that is found at the start of Herodotus’s Histories occupies a prominent place because the historian wishes to begin with stories exemplifying a basic determinant of human behavior that is generally felt to require no special explanation, namely acquisitiveness, which is conflated with sexual desire. This conflation, which is shown to be pervasive in Greek thought, is clear from the very start, where the abduction of Io for seemingly commercial purposes is followed by three abductions in which the sexual motivation is increasingly apparent.