radically different from ours it logically follows that they cannot
have known the emotions of love as we know them. The only symptom of
love referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures is Amnon's getting lean from
day to day and feigning sickness (II. Sam. 13: 1-22); and the story
shows what kind of love that was. It would be contrary to all reason
and psychological consistency to suppose that modern tenderness of
romantic feeling toward women could have existed among a people whose
greatest and wisest man could, for any reason whatever, chide a
returning victorious army, as Moses did (Numbers 31: 9-19), for saving
all the women alive, and could issue this command:

"Now, therefore, kill every male among the living ones,
and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with
him. But all the women children that have not known man
by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

The Arabs were the first Asiatics who spared women in war; the Hebrews
had not risen to that chivalrous stage of civilization. Joshua (8:26)
destroyed Ai and slew 12,000, "both of men and women:" and in Judges
(21:10-12) we read how the congregation sent an army of 12,000 men and
commanded them, saying,

"Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the
edge of the sword, with the women and the little ones.
And this is the thing ye shall do; ye shall utterly
destroy every male and every woman that hath lain by
man."

And they did so, sparing only the four hundred virgins. These were
given to the tribe of Benjamin, "that a tribe be not blotted out from
Israel;" and when it was found that more were needed they lay in wait
in the vineyards, and when the daughters of Shiloh came out to dance,
they caught them and carried them off as their wives; whence we see
that these Hebrews had not advanced beyond the low stage of evolution,
when wives are secured by capture or killed after battle. Among such
seek not for romantic love.


FOUR MORE BIBLE STORIES

Dr. Trumbull's opinion has already been cited that there are certainly
"gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded human
passions in the ancient East," in the stories of Shechem and Dinah,
Samson and the damsel of Timnah, David and Abigail, Adonijah and
Abishag. But I fail to find even "gleams" of romantic love in these
stories. Shechem said he loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah,
but he humbled her and dealt with her "as with an harlot," as her
brothers said after they had slain him for his conduct toward her.
Concerning Samson and the Timnah girl we are simply told that he saw
her and told his father, "Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well"
(literally, "she is right in my eyes"). And this is evidence of
romantic love! As for Abigail, after her husband has refused to feed
David's shepherds, and David has made up his mind therefore to slay
him and his offspring, she takes provisions and meets David and
induces him not to commit that crime; she does this not from love for
her husband, for when David has received her presents he says to her,
"See, I have hearkened to thy voice, and have accepted thy person."
Ten days later, Abigail's husband died, and when David heard of it he

"sent and spake concerning Abigail, to take her to him to
wife.... And she rose and bowed herself with her face to the
earth, and said, Behold, thine handmaid is a servant to wash
the feet of the servants of my lord. And Abigail, hasted,
and arose, and rode upon an ass, with five damsels of hers
that followed her; and she went after the messengers of
David, and became his wife."

And as if to emphasize how utterly unsentimental and un-Christian a
transaction this was, the next sentence tells us that "David also took
Ahinoam of Jezreel; and they became both of them his wives."


ABISHAG THE SHUNAMMITE

The last of the stories referred to by Dr. Trumbull, though as far
from proving his point as the others, is of peculiar interest because
it introduces us to the maiden who is believed by some commentators to
be the same as the Shulamite, the heroine of the _Song of Songs_.
After Solomon had become king his elder brother, Adonijah, went to the
mother of Solomon, Bath-sheba, and said:

"Thou knowest thy kingdom was mine, and that all Israel
set their faces on me, that I should reign: howbeit the
kingdom is turned about, and is become my brother's:
for it was his from the Lord. And now I ask one
petition of thee, deny me not.... Speak, I pray thee,
unto Solomon the king (for he will not say thee nay)
that he give me Abishag the Shunammite to wife."

But when Solomon heard this request he declared that Adonijah had
spoken that word against his own life; and he sent a man who fell on
him and killed him.

Who was this Abishag, the Shunammite? The opening lines of the First
Book of Kings tell us how she came to the court:

"Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they
covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore
his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my
lord the king, a young virgin, and let her stand before
the king and cherish him; and let her lie in thy bosom,
that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for
a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and
found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the
king. And the damsel was very fair; and she cherished
the king, and ministered to him; but the king knew her
not."


THE SONG OF SONGS

Now it is plausibly conjectured that this Abishag of Shunam or Shulam
(a town north of Jerusalem) was the same as the Shulamite of the _Song
of Songs_, and that in the lines 6:11-12 she tells how she was
kidnapped and brought to court.

I went down into the garden of nuts,
To see the green plants of the valley,
To see whether the vine budded,
And the pomegranates were in flower,
Or ever I was aware, my soul [desire] set me
Among the chariots of my princely people.

She also explains why her face is tanned like the dark tents of Kedar:
"My mother's sons were incensed against me, They made me keeper of the
vineyards." The added words "mine own vineyard have I not kept" are
interpreted by some as an apology for her neglected personal
appearance, but Renan (10) more plausibly refers them to her
consciousness of some indiscretion, which led to her capture. We may
suppose that, attracted by the glitter and the splendor of the royal
cavalcade, she for a moment longed to enjoy it, and her desire was
gratified. Brought to court to comfort the old king, she remained
after his death at the palace, and Solomon, who wished to add her to
his harem, killed his own brother when he found him coveting her. The
maiden soon regrets her indiscretion in having exposed herself to
capture. She is "a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley," and she
feels like a wildflower transplanted to a palace hall. While Solomon
in all his glory urges his suit, she, tormented by homesickness,
thinks only of her vineyard, her orchards, and the young shepherd
whose love she enjoyed in them. Absent-minded, as one in a revery, or
dreaming aloud, she answers the addresses of the king and his women in
words that ever refer to her shepherd lover:[289]

"Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou
feedest thy flock." "My beloved is unto me as a cluster
of henna flowers in the vineyards of En-gedi." "Behold,
thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant: Also our couch
is green." "As the apple-tree among the trees of the
wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under
his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet
to my taste." "The voice of my beloved! behold, he
cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the
hills." "My beloved is mine, and I am his: He feedeth
his flock among the lilies," "Come, my beloved, let us
go forth into the field, let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards.... There will I
give thee my love."

The home-sick country girl, in a word, has found out that the
splendors of the palace are not to her taste, and the thought of being
a young shepherd's darling is pleasanter to her than that of being an
old king's concubine. The polygamous rapture with which Solomon
addresses her: "There are three-score queens and four-score
concubines, and maidens without number," does not appeal to her rural
taste. She has no desire to be the hundred and forty-first piece of
mosaic inlaid in Solomon's palanquin (III., 9-10), and she stubbornly
resists his advances until, impressed by her firmness, and unwilling
to force her, the king allows her to return to her vineyard and her
lover.

The view that the gist of the _Song of Songs_ is the Shulamite's love
of a shepherd and her persistent resistance to the advances of
Solomon, was first advanced in 1771 by J.F. Jacobi, and is now
universally accepted by the commentators, the overwhelming majority of
whom have also given up the artificial and really blasphemous
allegorical interpretation of this poem once in vogue, but ignored in
the Revised Version, as well as the notion that Solomon wrote the
poem. Apart from all other arguments, which are abundant, it is absurd
to suppose that Solomon would have written a drama to proclaim his own
failure to win the love of a simple country girl. In truth, it is very
probable that, as Renan has eloquently set forth (91-100), the _Song
of Songs_ was written practically for the purpose of holding up
Solomon to ridicule. In the northern part of his kingdom there was a
strong feeling against him on account of his wicked ways and vicious
innovations, especially his harem, and other expensive habits that
impoverished the country. "Taken all in all," says the Rev. W.E.
Griffis, of Solomon (44),

"he was probably one of the worst sinners described in
the Old Testament. With its usual truth and
fearlessness, the Scriptures expose his real character,
and by the later prophets and by Jesus he is ignored or
referred to only in rebuke."

The contempt and hatred inspired by his actions were especially vivid
shortly after his death, when the _Song of Songs_ is believed to have
been written (Renan, 97); and, as this author remarks (100),

"the poet seems to have been animated by a real spite
against the king; the establishment of a harem, in
particular, appears to incense him greatly, and he
takes evident pleasure in showing us a simple shepherd
girl triumphing over the presumptuous sultan who thinks
he can buy love, like everything else, with his gold."

That this is intended to be the moral of this Biblical drama is
further shown by the famous lines near the close:

"For love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the
grave [literally: passion is as inexorable (or hard) as
sheol]: The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very
flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench it, nor
can the floods drown it: If a man should give all the
substance of his house for love, he [it] would utterly
be contemned."

These lines constitute the last of the passages cited by my critics to
prove that the ancient Hebrews knew romantic love and its power. They
doubtless did know the power of love; all the ancient civilized
nations knew it as a violent sensual impulse which blindly sacrifices
life to attain its object. The ancient Hindoos embodied their idea of
irresistible power in the force and fury of an amorous elephant. Among
animals in general, love is even stronger than death. Male animals of
most species engage in deadly combat for the females. "For most
insects," says Letourneau, "to love and to die are almost synonymous
terms, and yet they do not even try to resist the amorous frenzy that
urges them on." Yet no one would dream of calling this romantic love;
from that it differs as widely as the insect mind in general differs
from the human mind. Waters cannot quench any kind of love or
affection nor floods drown it. What we are seeking for are _actions or
words describing the specific symptoms of sentimental love_, and these
are not to be found in this passage any more than elsewhere in the
Bible. An old man may buy a girl's body, but he cannot, with all his
wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual;
love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the
shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided
attentions of a decrepit king, though he be a Solomon.

It would be strange if this purely profane poem, which was added to
the Scriptural collection only by an unusual stretch of
liberality,[290] and in which there is not one mention of God or of
religion, should give a higher conception of sexual love than the
books which are accepted as inspired, and which paint manners,
emotions, and morals as the writers found them. As a matter of fact
the _Song of Songs_ was long held to be so objectionable that the
Talmudists did not allow young people to read it before their
thirtieth year. Whiston denounced it as foolish, lascivious, and
idolatrous. "The excessively amative character of some passages is
designated as almost blasphemous when supposed to be addressed by
Christ to his Church,"[291] as it was by the allegorists. On the other
hand there is a class of commentators to whom this poem is the ideal
of all that is pure and lovely. Herder went into ecstasies over it.
Israel Abrahams refers to it (163) as "the noblest of love-poems;" as
"this idealization of love." The Rev. W.E. Griffis declares
rapturously (166, 63, 21, 16, 250) that "the purest-minded virgin may
safely read the _Song of Songs_, in which is no trace of immoral
thought." In it "sensuality is scorned and pure love glorified;" it
"sets forth the eternal romance of true love," and is "chastely pure
in word and delicate in idea throughout." "The poet of the Canticle
shows us how to love." "An angel might envy such artless love dwelling
in a human heart."

The truth, as usual in such cases, lies about half-way between these
extreme views. There is only one passage which is objectionably coarse
in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet,
on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental
in its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that
there is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color a
similar love-story if told by a modern poet. The _Song of Songs_ is so
confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repetitions and
repeated dénouements so puzzling,[293] that commentators are not
always agreed as to what character in the drama is to be held
responsible for certain lines; but for our purpose this difficulty
makes no difference. Taking the lines just as they stand, I find that
the following:--1: 2-4, 13 (in one version), 17; 2: 6; 4: 16; 5: 1; 8:
2, 3--are indelicate in language or suggestion, as every student of
Oriental amorous poetry knows, and no amount of specious argumentation
can alter this. The descriptions of the beauty and charms of the
beloved or the lover, are, moreover, invariably sensuous and often
sensual. Again and again are their bodily charms dwelt on rapturously,
as is customary in the poems of all Orientals with all sorts of quaint
hyperbolic comparisons, some of which are poetic, others grotesque. No
fewer than five times are the external charms thus enumerated, but not
once in the whole poem is any allusion made to the spiritual
attractions, the mental and moral charms of femininity which are the
food of romantic love. Mr. Griffis, who cannot help commenting (223)
on this frequent description of the human body, makes a desperate
effort to come to the rescue. Referring to 4: 12-14, he says (212)
that the lover now "adds a more delicate compliment to her modesty,
her instinctive refinement, her chaste life, her purity amid court
temptations. He praises her inward ornaments, her soul's charms." What
are these ornaments? The possible reference to her chastity in the
lines: "A garden shut up is my sister, my bride. A spring shut up, a
fountain sealed"--a reference which, if so intended, would be regarded
by a Christian maiden not as a compliment, but an insult; while every
student of Eastern manners knows that an Oriental makes of his wife "a
garden shut up," and "a fountain sealed" not by way of complimenting
her chastity, but because he has no faith in it whatever, knowing that
so far as it exists it is founded on fear, not on affection. Mr.
Griffis knows this himself when he does not happen to be idealizing an
impossible shepherd girl, for he says (161):

"To one familiar with the literature, customs, speech, and
ideas of the women who live where idolatry prevails, and the
rulers and chief men of the country keep harems, the amazing
purity and modesty of maidens reared in Christian homes is
like a revelation from heaven."[294]

Supersensual charms are not alluded to in the _Song of Songs_, for the
simple reason that Orientals never did, and do not now, care for such
charms in women or cultivate them. They know love only as an appetite,
and in accordance with Oriental taste and custom the _Song of Songs_
compares it always to things that are good to eat or drink or smell.
Hence such ecstatic expressions as "How much better is thy love than
wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all manner of spices!"
Hence her declaration that her beloved is

"as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood.... I sat
down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was
sweet to my taste.... Stay ye me with raisins, comfort me
with apples: For I am sick of love. His left hand is under
my head, and his right hand doth embrace me."

Hence the shepherd's description of his love: "I am come into the
garden, my sister, my bride: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice: I
have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my
milk."

Modern love does not express itself in such terms; it is more mental
and sentimental, more esthetic and sympathetic, more decorous and
delicate, more refined and supersensual. While it is possible that, as
Renan suggests (143), the author of the Canticles conceived his
heroine as a saint of her time, rising above sordid reality, it is
clear from all we have said that the author himself was not able to
rise above Orientalism. The manners of the East, both ancient and
modern, are incompatible with romantic love, because they suppress the
evolution of feminine refinement and sexual mentality. The documents
of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and
Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between
the sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is
its last and most beautiful flower.


GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS

The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love,
instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one
of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even
the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew
it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but
self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case
incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of
the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore,
we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and
poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must
hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.


CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE

Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so
foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the
ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers,
sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we
know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in
his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings
precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the
second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries
to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put
too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he
examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up
his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He
admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the
sexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should
have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he
refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof
that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as
Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope,
Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.

"Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been
unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice,
was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can
devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for
the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with
bitter pertinacity?"

Hegel's episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding
the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus
failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my
revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the
evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.
Commenting on my assertion that there are no stories of romantic love
in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London _Daily News_
exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had
nothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheus
and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and
Procris, the writer adds,

"It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl
could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others." "The Greeks were
human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings,
which really vary but little...."

The New York _Mail and Express_ also devoted an editorial article to
my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an
exclusively modern sentiment,

"we must get rid of some old-fashioned fancies. How
shall we hereafter classify our old friends Hero and
Leander? Leander was a fine fellow, just like the
handsomest boy you know. He fell in love with the
lighthouse-keeper's daughter[!] and used to swim over
the river[!] every night and make love to her. It was
all told by an old Greek named Musaeus. How did he get
such modern notions into his noddle? How, moreover,
shall we classify Daphnis and Chloe? This fine old
romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a
love-story as ever skipped in prose."

"Daphnis and Chloe," wrote a New Haven critic, "is one of the most
idyllic love-stories ever written." "The love story of Hero and
Leander upsets this author's theory completely," said a Rochester
reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that "in the pages
of Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, the
young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans's
latest." A Boston censor pronounced my theory "simply absurd," adding:

"Mr. Finck's reading, wide as it is, is not wide
enough; for had he read the Alexandrian poets,
Theoeritus especially, or Behr A'Adin among the Arabs,
to speak of no others, he could not possibly have had
courage left to maintain his theory; and with him,
really, it seems more a matter of courage than of
facts, notwithstanding his evident training in a
scientific atmosphere."


GLADSTONE ON THE WOMEN OF HOMER

The divers specifications of my ignorance and stupidity contained in
the foregoing criticisms will be attended to in their proper place in
the chronological order of the present chapter, which naturally begins
with Homer's epics, as nothing definite is known of Greek literature
before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity,
not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to
discover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was
held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as
Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated.
Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped
to dispel the mists of ignorance, and in 1775 appeared Robert Wood's
book, _On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, which combated
the foolish prejudice against the poet, due to the coarseness of the
manners he depicts. Wood admits (161) that "most of Homer's heroes
would, in the present age, be capitally convicted, in any country in
Europe, on the poet's evidence;" but this, he explains, does not
detract from the greatness of Homer, who, upon an impartial view,
"will appear to excel his own state of society, in point of decency
and delicacy, as much as he has surpassed more polished ages in point
of genius."

In this judicious discrimination between the genius of Homer and the
realistic coarseness of his heroes, Wood forms an agreeable contrast
to many modern Homeric scholars, notably the Rt. Hon. W.E. Gladstone,
who, having made this poet his hobby, tried to persuade himself and
his readers that nearly everything relating not only to Homer, but to
the characters he depicts, was next door to perfection. Confining
ourselves to the topic that concerns us here, we read, in his _Studies
on Homer_ (II., 502), that "we find throughout the poems those signs
of the overpowering force of conjugal attachments which ... we might
expect." And in his shorter treatise on Homer he thus sums up his
views as to the position and estimate of woman in the heroic age, as
revealed in Homer's female characters:

"The most notable of them compare advantageously with
those commended to us in the Old Testament; while
Achaiian Jezebels are nowhere found. There is a certain
authority of the man over the woman; but it does not
destroy freedom, or imply the absence either of
respect, or of a close mental and moral fellowship. Not
only the relation of Odysseus to Penelope and of Hector
to Andromache, but those of Achilles to Briseis, and of
Menelaus to the returned Helen, are full of dignity and
attachment. Briseis was but a captive, yet Achilles
viewed her as in expectation a wife, called her so,
avowed his love for her, and laid it down that not he
only, but every man must love his wife if he had sense
and virtue. Among the Achaiian Greeks monogamy is
invariable; divorce unknown; incest abhorred.... The
sad institution which, in Saint Augustine's time, was
viewed by him as saving the world from yet worse evil
is unknown or unrecorded. Concubinage prevails in the
camp before Troy, but only simple concubinage. Some of
the women, attendants in the Ithacan palace, were
corrupted by the evil-minded Suitors; but some were
not. It should, perhaps, be noted as a token of the
respect paid to the position of the woman, that these
very bad men are not represented as ever having
included in their plans the idea of offering violence
to Penelope. The noblest note, however, of the Homeric
woman remains this, that she shared the thought and
heart of her husband: as in the fine utterance of
Penelope she prays that rather she may be borne away by
the Harpies than remain to 'glad the heart of a meaner
man' (_Od_. XX., 82) than her husband, still away from
her."

Only a careful student of Homer can quite realize the diplomatic
astuteness which inspired this sketch of Homeric morals. Its amazing
sophistry can, however, be made apparent even to one who has never
read the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.


ACHILLES AS A LOVER

The Trojan War lasted ten years. Its object was to punish Paris, son
of the King of Troy, for eloping with Helen, the wife of Menelaus,
King of Sparta, and taking away a shipload of treasures to boot. The
subject of Homer's _Iliad_ is popularly supposed to be this Trojan
War; in reality, however, it covers less than two months (fifty-two
days) of those ten years, and its theme, as the first lines indicate,
is the wrath of Achilles--the ruinous wrath, which in the tenth year,
brought on the other Greek warriors woes innumerable. Achilles had
spent much of the intervening time in ravaging twelve cities of Asia
Minor, carrying away treasures and captive women, after the piratical
Greek custom. One of these captives was Briseis, a high priest's
daughter, whose husband and three brothers he had slain with his own
hand, and who became his favorite concubine. King Agamemnon, the chief
commander of the Greek forces, also had for his favorite concubine a
high priest's daughter, named Chryseis. Her father came to ransom the
captive girl, but Agamemnon refused to give her up because, as he
confessed with brutal frankness, he preferred her to his wife.[295]
For this refusal Apollo brings a pestilence on the Greek army, which
can be abated only by restoring Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon at
last consents, on condition that some other prize of honor be given to
him--though, as Thersites taunts him (II, 226-228), his tents are
already full of captive women, among whom he always has had first
choice. Achilles, too, informs him that he shall have all the women he
wants when Troy is taken; but what really hurts Agamemnon's feelings
is not so much the loss of his favorite as the thought that the hated
Achilles should enjoy Briseis, while his prize, Chryseis, must be
returned to her father. So he threatens to retaliate on Achilles by
taking Briseis from his tent and keeping her for himself. "I would
deserve the name of coward," retorts Achilles

"were I to yield to you in everything.... But this let me
say--Never shall I lift my arm to strive for the girl either
with you or any other man; you gave her, you can take her.
But of all else, by the dark ship, that belongs to me,
thereof you shall not take anything against my will. Do that
and all shall see your black blood trickle down my spear."

Having made this "uncowardly," chivalrous, and romantic distinction
between his two kinds of property--yielding Briseis, but threatening
murder if aught else belonging to him be touched--Achilles goes and
orders his friend Patroclus to take the young woman from the tent and
give her to the king. She leaves her paramour--her husband's and
brothers' murderer--unwillingly, and he sits down and weeps--why?
because, as he tells his mother, he has been insulted by Agamemnon,
who has taken away his prize of honor. From that moment Achilles
refuses to join the assemblies, or take a part in the battles, thus
bringing "woes innumerable" on his countrymen. He refuses to yield
even after Agamemnon, alarmed by his reverses, seeks to conciliate him
by offering him gold and horses and women in abundance; telling him he
shall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has never
touched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than human
beauty; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the city
capitulates; and, in addition to these, one of the three princesses,
his own daughters--twenty-nine women in all!

Must not a hero who so stubbornly and wrathfully resented the seizure
of his concubine have been deeply in love with her? He himself remarks
to Odysseus, who comes to attempt a reconciliation (IX., 340-44):

"Do the sons of Atreus alone of mortal men love their
bedfellows? Every man who is good and sensible loves his
concubine and cares for her as I too love mine with all my
heart, though but the captive of my spear."

Gladstone here translates the word [Greek: alochos] "wife," though, as
far as Achilles is concerned, it means concubine. Of course it would
have been awkward for England's Prime Minister to make Achilles say
that "every man must love his concubine, if he has sense and virtue;"
so he arbitrarily changes the meaning of the word and then begs us to
notice the moral beauty of this sentiment and the "dignity" of the
relation between Achilles and Briseis! Yet no one seems to have
denounced him for this transgression against ethics, philology, and
common sense. On the contrary, a host of translators and commentators
have done the same thing, to the obscuration of the truth.

Nor is this all. When we examine what the Achilles of Homer means by
the fine phrase "every man loves his bedfellow as I love mine," we
come across a grotesque parody even of sensual infatuation, not to
speak of romantic love. If Achilles had been animated by the strong
individual preference which sometimes results even from animal
passion, he would not have told Agamemnon, "take Briseis, but don't
you dare to touch any of my other property or I will smash your
skull." If he had been what _we_ understand by a lover, he would not
have been represented by the poet, after Briseis was taken away from
him, as having "his heart consumed by grief" because "he yearned for
_the battle_." He would, instead, have yearned for the girl. And when
Agamemnon offered to give her back untouched, Achilles, had he been a
real lover, would have thrown pride and wrath to the winds and
accepted the offer with eagerness and alacrity.

But the most amazing part of the story is reached when we ask what
Achilles means when he says that every good and sensible man [Greek:
phileei kai kaedetai]--loves and cherishes--his concubine, as he
professes to love his own. _How_ does he love Briseis? Patroclus had
promised her (XIX., 297-99), probably for reasons of his own (she is
represented as being extremely fond of him), to see to it that
Achilles would ultimately make her his legitimate wife, but Achilles
himself never dreams of such a thing, as we see in lines 393-400, book
IX. After refusing the offer of one of Agamemnon's daughters, he goes
on to remark:

"If the gods preserve me and I return to my home, Peleus
himself will seek a wife for me. There are many Achaian
maidens in Hellas and Phthia, daughters of city-protecting
princes. Among these I shall select the one I desire to be
my dear wife. Very often is my manly heart moved with
longing to be there to take a wedded wife [Greek: mnaestaen
alochon], and enjoy the possessions Peleus has gathered."

And if any further detail were needed to prove how utterly shallow,
selfish, and sensual was his "love" of Briseis, we should find it a
few lines later (663) where the poet naïvely tells us, as a matter of
course, that

"Achilles slept in the innermost part of the tent and
by his side lay a beautiful-cheeked woman, whom he had
brought from Lesbos. On the other side lay Patroclus
with the fair Isis by his side, the gift of Achilles."

Obviously even individual preference was not a strong ingredient in
the "love" of these "heroes," and we may well share the significant
surprise of Ajax (638) that Achilles should persist in his wrath when
seven girls were offered him for one. Evidently the tent of Achilles,
like that of Agamemnon, was full of women (in line 366 he especially
refers to his assortment of "fair-girdled women" whom he expects to
take home when the war is over); yet Gladstone had the audacity to
write that though concubinage prevailed in the camp before Troy, it
was "only single concubinage." In his larger treatise he goes so far
as to apologize for these ruffians--who captured and traded off women
as they would horses or cows--on the ground that they were away from
their wives and were indulging in the "mildest and least licentious"
of all forms of adultery! Yet Gladstone was personally one of the
purest and noblest of men. Strange what somersaults a hobby ridden too
hard may induce a man to make in his ethical attitude!


ODYSSEUS, LIBERTINE AND RUFFIAN

If we now turn from the hero of the _Iliad_ to the hero of the
_Odyssey_, we find the same Gladstone declaring (II., 502) that "while
admitting the superior beauty of Calypso as an immortal, Ulysses
frankly owns to her that his heart is pining every day for Penelope;"
and in the shorter treatise he goes so far as to say (131), that

"the subject of the Odyssey gives Homer the opportunity
of setting forth the domestic character of Odysseus, in
his profound attachment to wife, child, and home, in
such a way as to adorn not only the hero, but his age
and race."

The "profound attachment" of Odysseus to his wife may be gauged in the
first place by the fact that he voluntarily remained away from her ten
years, fighting to recover, for another king, a worthless, adulterous
wench. Before leaving on this expedition, from which he feared he
might never return, he spoke to his wife, as she herself relates
(XVIII., 269), begging her to be mindful of his father and mother,
"and when you see our son a bearded man, then marry whom you will, and
leave the house now yours"--namely for the benefit of the son, for
whose welfare he was thus more concerned than for a monopoly of his
wife's love.

After the Trojan war was ended he embarked for home, but suffered a
series of shipwrecks and misfortunes. On the island of Aeaea he spent
a whole year sharing the hospitality and bed of the beautiful
sorceress Circe, with no pangs of conscience for such conduct, nor
thought of home, till his comrades, in spite of the "abundant meat and
pleasant wine," longed to depart and admonished him in these words:
"Unhappy man, it is time to think of your native land, if you are
destined ever to be saved and to reach your home in the land of your
fathers." Thus they spoke and "persuaded his manly heart." In view of
the ease with which he thus abandoned himself for a whole year to a
life of indulgence, till his comrades prodded his conscience, we may
infer that he was not so very unwilling a prisoner afterward, of the
beautiful nymph Calypso, who held him eight years by force on her
island. We read, indeed, that, at the expiration of these years,
Odysseus was always weeping, and his sweet life ebbed away in longing
for his home. But all the sentiment is taken out of this by the words
which follow: [Greek: epei ouketi aendane numphae] "_because the nymph
pleased him no more_!" Even so Tannhäuser tired of the pleasures in
the grotto of Venus, and begged to be allowed to leave.

While thus permitting himself the unrestrained indulgence of his
passions, without a thought of his wife, Odysseus has the barbarian's
stern notions regarding the duties of women who belong to him. There
are fifty young women in his palace at home who ply their hard tasks
and bear the servant's lot. Twelve of these, having no one to marry,
yield to the temptations of the rich princes who sue for the hand of
Penelope in the absence of her husband.

Ulysses, on his return, hears of this, and forthwith takes measures to
ascertain who the guilty ones are. Then he tells his son Telemachus
and the swineherd and neatherd to

"go and lead forth these serving-maids out of the
stately hall to a spot between the roundhouse and the
neat courtyard wall, and smite them with your long
swords till you take life from all, so that they may
forget their secret amours with the suitors."

The "discreet" Telemachus carried out these orders, leading the maids
to a place whence there was no escape and exclaiming:

"'By no honorable death would I take away the lives of
those who poured reproaches on my head and on my