The English language is a queer instrument of thought.  While coyness has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness, shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb “to coy” may mean the exact opposite—­to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy.  It is in this sense that “coyness” is obviously a trait of primitive maidens.  What is more surprising is to find in brushing aside prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are “coy.”  The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve is stigmatized as the temptress.  Rebekah had never seen the man chosen for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go with his servant, she answered, promptly, “I will go.”  Rachel at the well suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight.  Ruth does all the courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz.  There is no shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; no suggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them the women make the advances.  Potiphar’s wife is another biblical case.  The word coy does not occur once in the Bible.

The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece.  In the Odyssey we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoying the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their appetites.  When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him too, saying, “Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other.”  Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the Sirens, who are always “casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting within a meadow,” in order to decoy passing sailors.  Charybdis is another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin.  The island nymph Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home “because the nymph pleased him no more.”  Nor does the human Nausicaea manifest the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river.  Though he has been cast on the shore naked, she remains, after her maids have run away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe.  Then, after seeing him bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids:  “Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here and content to stay;” while to him later on she gives this broad hint:  “Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land, remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving of your life.”

Nausicaea is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the Greek poets habitually paint her.  Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking of a temple of Peeping Venus says: