mother, and lay beside the suitors.'"
"He spoke and tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a
great pillar, then lashed it to the roundhouse,
stretching it high across, too high for one to touch
the feet upon the ground. And as the wide-winged
thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the
bushes; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed
receives them; even so the women held their heads in
line, and around every neck a noose was laid that they
might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a
little, but not long."

A more dastardly, cowardly, unmanly deed is not on record in all human
literature, yet the instigator of it, Odysseus, is always the "wise,"
"royal," "princely," "good," and "godlike," and there is not the
slightest hint that the great poet views his assassination of the poor
maidens as the act of a ruffian, an act the more monstrous and
unpardonable because Homer (XXII., 37) makes Odysseus himself say to
the suitors that they outraged his maids by force ([Greek: biaios]).
What world-wide difference in this respect between the greatest poet
of antiquity and Jesus of Nazareth who, when the Scribes and Pharisees
brought before him a woman who had erred like the maids of Odysseus,
and asked if she should be stoned as the law of Moses commanded, said
unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her;" whereupon, being convicted by their own consciences,
they went out one by one. And Jesus said, "Where are those thine
accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?" She said, "No man, Lord." And
Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more."
He is lenient to the sinner because of his sense of justice and mercy;
yet at the same time his ethical ideal is infinitely higher than
Homer's. He preaches that "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after
her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart;" whereas
Homer's ideas of sexual morality are, in the last analysis, hardly
above those of a savage. The dalliance of Odysseus with the nymphs,
and the licentious treatment of women captives by all the "heroes," do
not, any more than the cowardly murder of the twelve maids, evoke a
word of censure, disgust, or disapproval from his lips.

His gods are on the same low level as his heroes, if not lower. When
the spouse of Zeus, king of the gods, wishes to beguile him, she knows
no other way than borrowing the girdle of Aphrodite. But this scene
(_Iliad_, XIV., 153 _seq_.) is innocuous compared with the shameless
description of the adulterous amours of Ares and Aphrodite in the
Odyssey (VIII., 266-365), in presence of the gods, who treat the
matter as a great joke. For a parallel to this passage we would have
to descend to the Botocudos or the most degraded Australians. All of
which proves that the severity of the punishment inflicted on the
twelve maids of Odysseus does not indicate a high regard for chastity,
but is simply another illustration of typical barbarous fury against
women for presuming to do anything without the consent of the man
whose private property they are.


WAS PENELOPE A MODEL WIFE?

If the real Odysseus, unprincipled, unchivalrous, and cruel, is
anything but a hero who "adorns his age and race," must it not be
conceded, at any rate, that "the unwearied fidelity of Penelope,
awaiting through the long revolving years the return of her
storm-tossed husband," presents, as Lecky declares (II., 279), and as
is commonly supposed, a picture of perennial beauty "which Rome and
Christendom, chivalry and modern civilization, have neither eclipsed
nor transcended?"

We have seen that the fine words of Achilles regarding his "love" of
Briseis are, when confronted with his actions, reduced to empty
verbiage. The same result is reached in the case of Penelope, if we
subject her actions and motives to a searching critical analysis.
Ostensibly, indeed, she is set up as a model of that feminine
constancy which men at all times have insisted on while they
themselves preferred to be models of inconstancy. As usual in such
cases, the feminine model is painted with touches of almost grotesque
exaggeration. After the return of Odysseus Penelope informed her nurse
(XXIII., 18) that she has not slept soundly all this time--twenty
years! Such phrases, too, are used as "longing for Odysseus, I waste
my heart away," or "May I go to my dread grave seeing Odysseus still,
and never gladden heart of meaner husband." But they are mere phrases.
The truth about her attitude and her-feelings is told frankly in
several places by three different persons--the goddess of wisdom,
Telemachus, and Penelope herself. Athene urges Telemachus to make
haste that he may find his blameless mother still at home instead of
the bride of one of the suitors.

"But let her not against your will take treasure from your
home. You know a woman's way; she strives to enrich his
house who marries her, while of her former children and the
husband of her youth, when he is dead she thinks not, and
she talks of him no more" (XV., 15-23).

In the next book (73-77) Telemachus says to the swineherd:

"Moreover my mother's feeling wavers, whether to bide beside
me here and keep the house, and thus revere her husband's
bed and _heed the public voice_, or finally to follow some
chief of the Achaians who woos her in the hall with largest
gifts."

And a little later (126) he exclaims, "She neither declines the hated
suit nor has she power to end it, while they with feasting impoverish
my home."

These words of Telcinachus are endorsed in full by Penelope herself,
whose remarks (XIX., 524-35) to the disguised Odysseus give us the key
to the whole situation and explain why she lies abed so much weeping
and not knowing what to do.

" ... so does my doubtful heart toss to and fro whether
to bide beside my son and keep all here in safety--my
goods, my maids, and my great high-roofed house--and
thus revere my husband and _heed the public voice_, or
finally to follow some chief of the Achaiians who woos
me in my hall with countless gifts. My son, while but a
child and slack of understanding, _did not permit my
marrying_ and departing from my husband's home; but now
that he is grown and come to man's estate, he prays me
to go home again and leave the hall, so troubled is he
for that substance which the Achaiians waste."

If these words mean anything, they mean that what kept Penelope from
marrying again was not affection for her husband but the desire to
live up to the demands of "the public voice" and the fact that her
son--who, according to Greek usage, was her master--would not permit
her to do so. This, then, was the cause of that proverbial constancy!
But a darker shadow still is cast on her much-vaunted affection by her
cold and suspicious reception of her husband on his return. While the
dog recognized him at once and the swineherd was overjoyed, she, the
wife, held him aloof, fearing that he might be some man who had come
to cheat her! At first Odysseus thought she scorned him because he
"was foul and dressed in sorry clothes;" but even after he had bathed
and put on his princely attire she refused to embrace him, because she
wished to "prove her husband!" No wonder that her son declared that
her "heart is always harder than a stone," and that Odysseus himself
thus accosts her:

"Lady, a heart impenetrable beyond the sex of women the
dwellers on Olympus gave you. There is no other woman
of such stubborn spirit to stand off from the husband
who, after many grievous toils, came in the twentieth
year home to his native land. Come then, good nurse,
and make my bed, that I may lie alone. For certainly of
iron is the heart within her breast."


HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE

A much closer approximation to the modern ideal of conjugal love than
the attachment between Odysseus and Penelope with the "heart of iron,"
may be found in the scene describing Hector's leave-taking of
Andromache before he goes out to fight the Greeks, fearing he may
never return. The serving-women inform him that his wife, hearing that
the Trojans were hard pressed, had gone in haste to the wall, like
unto one frenzied. He goes to find her and when he arrives at the
Skaian gates, she comes running to meet him, together with the nurse,
who holds his infant boy on her bosom. Andromache weeps, recalls to
his mind that she had lost her father, mother, and seven brothers,
wherefore he is to her a father, mother, brothers, as well as a
husband. "Have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy
child an orphan and thy wife a widow." Though Hector cannot think of
shrinking from battle like a coward, he declared that her fate, should
the city fall and he be slain, troubles him more than that of his
father, mother, and brothers--the fate of being led into captivity and
slavery by a Greek, doomed to carry water and to be pointed at as the
former wife of the brave Hector. He expresses the wish that his
boy--who at first is frightened by the horse-hair crest on his
helmet--may become greater than his father, bringing with him
blood-stained spoils from the enemy he has slain, and gladdening his
mother's heart; then caressing his wife with his hand, he begs her not
to sorrow overmuch, but to go to her house and see to her own tasks,
the loom and the distaff. Thus he spake, and she departed for her
home, oft looking back and letting fall big tears.

This scene, which takes up four pages of the _Iliad_ (VI., 370-502),
is the most touching, the most inspired, the most sentimental and
modern passage not only in the Homeric poems, but in all Greek
literature. Benecke has aptly remarked (10) that the relation between
Hector and Andromache is unparalleled in that literature; and he adds:

"At the same time, how little really sympathetic to the
Greek of the period was this wonderful and unique passage is
sufficiently shown by this very fact, that no attempt was
ever made to imitate or develop it. It may sound strange to
say so, but in all probability we to-day understand
Andromache better than did the Greeks, for whom she was
created; better, too, perhaps than did her creator himself."

Benecke should have written Hector in place of Andromache. There was
no difficulty, even for a Greek, in understanding Andromache. She had
every reason, even from a purely selfish point of view, to dread
Hector's battling with the savage Greeks; for while he lived she was a
princess, with all the comforts of life, whereas his fall and the fall
of Troy meant her enslavement and a life of misery. What makes the
scene in question so modern is the attitude of Hector--his dividing
his caresses equally between his wife and his son, and assuring her
that he is more troubled about her fate and anguish than about what
may befall his father, mother, and brothers. That is an utterly
un-Greek sentiment, and that is the reason why the passage was not
imitated. It was not a realistic scene from life, but a mere product
of Homer's imagination and glowing genius--like the pathetic scene in
which Odysseus wipes away a tear on noting that his faithful dog Argos
recognized him and wagged his tail. It is extremely improbable that a
man who could behave so cruelly toward women as Odysseus did could
have thus sympathized with a dog.

Certainly no one else did, not even his "faithful" Penelope. As long
as Argos was useful in the chase, the poet tells us, he was well taken
care of; but now that he was old, he "lay neglected upon a pile of
dung," doomed to starve, for he had not strength to move. Homer alone,
with the prophetic insight of a genius, could have conceived such a
touch of modern sentiment toward animals, so utterly foreign to
ancient ideas; and he alone could have put such a sentiment of
wife-love into the mouth of the Trojan Hector--a barbarian whose ideal
of manliness and greatness consisted in "bringing home blood-stained
spoils of the enemy."


BARBAROUS TREATMENT OF GREEK WOMEN

It seems like a touch of sarcasm that Homer incarnates his isolated
and un-Greek ideal of devotion to a wife in a _Trojan_, as if to
indicate that it must not be accepted as a touch of _Greek_ life. From
our point of view it is a stroke of genius. On the other hand it is
obvious that attributing such a sentiment to a Trojan likewise cannot
be anything but a poetic license; for these Trojans were quite as
piratical, coarse, licentious, and polygamous as the Greeks, Hector's
own father having had fifty children, nineteen of whom were borne by
his wife, thirty-one by various concubines. Many pages of the _Iliad_
bear witness to the savage ferocity of Greeks and Trojans alike--a
ferocity utterly incompatible with such tender emotions as Homer
himself was able to conceive in his imagination. The ferocity of
Achilles is typical of the feelings of these heroes. Not content with
slaughtering an enemy who meets him in honorable battle, defending his
wife and home, he thrust thongs of ox-hide through the prostrate
Hector's feet, bound him to his chariot, lashed his horses to speed,
and dragged him about in sight of the wailing wife and parents of his
victim. This he repeated several times, aggravating the atrocity a
hundredfold by his intention--in spite of the piteous entreaties of
the dying Hector--to throw his corpse to be eaten by the dogs, thus
depriving even his spirit of rest, and his family of religious
consolation. Nay, Achilles expresses the savage wish that his rage
might lead him so far as to carve and eat raw Hector's flesh. The
Homeric "hero," in short, is almost on a level in cruelty with the red
Indian.

But it is in their treatment of women--which Gladstone commends so
highly--that the barbarous nature of the Greek "heroes" is revealed in
all its hideous nakedness. The king of their gods set them the example
when he punished his wife and queen by hanging her up amid the clouds
with two anvils suspended from her feet; clutching and throwing to the
earth any gods that came to her rescue. (_Iliad,_ XV., 15-24.) Rank
does not exempt the women of the heroic age from slavish toil.
Nausicäa, though a princess, does the work of a washerwoman and drives
her own chariot to the laundry on the banks of the river, her only
advantage over her maids being that they have to walk.[296] Her
mother, too, queen of the Phoeaceans, spends her time sitting among
the waiting maids spinning yarn, while her husband sits idle and "sips
his wine like an immortal." The women have to do all the work to make
the men comfortable, even washing their feet, giving them their bath,
anointing them, and putting their clothes on them again (_Odyssey,_
XIX., 317; VIII., 454; XVII., 88, etc.),[297] even a princess like
Polycaste, daughter of the divine Nestor, being called upon to perform
such menial service (III., 464-67). As for the serving-maids, they
grind corn, fetch water, and do other work, just like red squaws; and
in the house of Odysseus we read of a poor girl, who, while the others
were sleeping, was still toiling at her corn because her weakness had
prevented her from finishing her task (XX., 110).

Penelope was a queen, but was very far from being treated like one.
Gladstone found "the strongest evidence of the respect in which women
were held" in the fact that the suitors stopped short of violence to
her person! They did everything but that, making themselves at home in
her house, unbidden and hated guests, debauching her maidservants, and
consuming her provisions by wholesale. But her own son's attitude is
hardly less disrespectful and insulting than that of the ungallant,
impertinent suitors. He repeatedly tells his mother to mind her own
business--the loom and the distaff--leaving words for men; and each
time the poet recommends this rude, unfilial speech as a "wise saying"
which the queen humbly "lays to heart." His love of property far
exceeds his love of his mother, for as soon as he is grown up he begs
her to go home and get married again, "so troubled is he for the
substance which the suitors waste." He urges her at last to "marry
whom she will," offering as an extra inducement "countless gifts" if
she will only go.

To us it seems topsy-turvy that a mother should have to ask her son's
consent to marry again, but to the Greeks that was a matter of course.
There are many references to this custom in the Homeric poems. Girls,
too, though they be princesses, are disposed of without the least
regard to their wishes, as when Agamemnon offers Achilles the choice
of one of his three daughters (IX., 145). Big sums are sometimes paid
for a girl--by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in battle, "far from
his bride, of whom he had known no joy, and much had he given for her;
first a hundred kine he gave, and thereafter promised a thousand,
goats and sheep together." The idea, too, occurs over and over again
that among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offer
should take the bride. How much this mercenary, unceremonious, and
often cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among these
Greeks is indicated by Homer's naïve epithet for brides, [Greek:
parthenoi alphesiboiai], "virgins who bring in oxen." And this is the
state of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying "there is a certain
authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom"!

The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of their wars,
as among the Australian savages, was usually woman, as Achilles
frankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve cities
and passed through many bloody days of battle, "_warring with folk for
their women's sake_." (_Iliad,_ IX., 327.) Nestor admonishes the
Greeks to "let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain by
some Trojan's wife" (354-55). The leader of the Greek forces issues
this command regarding the Trojans:

"Of them let not one escape sheer estruction at our hands,
not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb;
let not even him escape, but all perish together out of
Ilios, uncared for and unknown" (VI., 57);

while Homer, with consummate art, paints for us the terrors of a
captured city, showing how the women--of all classes--were maltreated:

"As a woman wails and clings to her dear husband, who
falls for town and people, seeking to shield his home
and children from the ruthless day; seeing him dying,
gasping, she flings herself on him with a piercing cry;
while men behind, smiting her with the spears on back
and shoulder, force her along to bondage to suffer toil
and trouble; with pain most pitiful her cheeks are
thin...." (_Odyssey,_ VIII., 523-30.)[298]


LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS

Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of
conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now
subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.

Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possibly
deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient
writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one
hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--the
following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and
in much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with the
distinctness of a painting:

"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough, which the gatherers
overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not
reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or
rather fragments of such, comprising the following:

"Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal
creature, bitter-sweet."
"Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain
falling on the oaks."
"Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend."
"Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will."
"For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like
her."

"Bitter-sweet," "giver of pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some
expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the
rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night
might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems,
and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the
following fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaíka Eromenaen] ("to a
beloved woman"):

"That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy
presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and
lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in
my bosom. For when I see thee but a little I have no
utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and
straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with
my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat bathes me,
and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than
grass, and seem in my madness little better than one
dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor ..."

The Platonist Longinus (third century) said that this ode was "not one
passion, but a congress of passions," and declared it the most perfect
expression in all ancient literature of the effects of love. A Greek
physician is said to have copied it into his book of diagnoses "as a
compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion." F.B. Jevons, in
his history of Greek literature (139), speaks of the "marvellous
fidelity in her representation of the passion of love." Long before
him Addison had written in the _Spectator_ (No. 223) that Sappho "felt
the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms."
Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never
since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry
like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the poet Swinburne,
speaks of the

"dignity of divinity, which informs the most passionate
and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with
such grandeur as would seem impossible to such
passion."

And J.A. Symonds assures us that "Nowhere, except, perhaps, in some
Persian or Provençal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions
of overmastering passion."

I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin version
of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations. The more
I read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more I
marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and
opinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to the
psychology of love and of the emotions in general. I have made a long
and minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; I
have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a
lover "paler than grass"; that his heart is apt to "flutter in his
bosom," and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved;
but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind,
deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead,
she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.

An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem.
Suppose you say to a friend:

"A woman was walking in the woods when she saw
something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart
fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a
cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and
looked as if she would faint and die: what did she
see?"

The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer "a bear!" In
truth, Sappho's famous "symptoms of love" are laughably like the
symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin,
Mosso, and others--"a cold sweat," "deadly pallor," "voice becoming
husky or failing altogether," "heart beating violently," "dizziness
which will blind him," "trembling of all the muscles of the body," "a
fainting fit." Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these
symptoms. Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may
cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular,
but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general. I am glad
that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of
diagnoses is not my family doctor.

Sappho's love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic. Of the
imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic,
affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give
us the faintest hint. Hegel remarked truly that "in the odes of Sappho
the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration,
yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood
than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul." Nor was Byron
deceived: "I don't think Sappho's ode a good example." The historian
Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):

"To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after
the style of Geibel's this erotic song of Sappho may seem
too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love
was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual
manner than we demand that it should be."

That is it precisely. These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic
love but sensual passion. Nor is this the worst of it. Sappho's
absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal
sensual passion. I have just said that they are purely physiologic;
but that is too much praise for them. The word physiologic implies
something healthy and normal, but Sappho's poems are not healthy and
normal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic. Had they been written
by a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and her
famous ode is addressed to a woman. A woman, too, is referred to in
her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton:

"What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who
wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies, she shall
soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give,
and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth."

In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which
refer to girls. Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the
moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen.
She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and
it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and
Constantinople, "as being," in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray,
"too much for the shaky morals of the time." Another recent writer,
Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that

"it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her
verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a
woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure
woman that her modern apologists would have her."

The following lament alone would prove this:

[Greek:
Deduke men a Selana
kai Plaeiades, mesai de
nuktes, para d' erxet ora
ego de mona katheudo.]


MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES

Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300]
but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of
the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate
the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate
erotic poems are addressed to women. These alienists have shown that
the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or
_vice versa_, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world. They
look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which
does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious
and unnatural practices. In every country there are thousands of girls
who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play
soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls.
When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to
masquerade in men's clothes, and when they hear of a girl's
love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in
dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to
kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such
marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of
different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by
violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion. Not a few
prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing
disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several
eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman
shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are
that her brain is of the masculine type. It is therefore quite
possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental
masculinity ("mascula Sappho" Horace calls her) being her misfortune,
not her fault. But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and
take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal
impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the
Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not
overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased
brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of
erotic pathology. Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as
the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species,
and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic
passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it
cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]


ANACREON AND OTHERS

There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest
Greek poets. By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations
philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with
their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720
B.C.--say 2700 years ago. Hesiod probably flourished near the end of
the seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in
the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear--little more
than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come
down to us--Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus,
Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others. Best known of all
these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has
been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or
those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has
aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant
profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic
love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to
a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I
have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when
he remarks (25) regarding Mimnermus: "'What is life without love?' he
says; he does not say, 'What is life without your love?'" Even in
Sappho, I may add here, in spite of the seeming violence of her
passion, this quality of individual preference is really lacking or
weak, for she is constantly transferring her attention from one girl
to another. And as Sappho's poems are addressed to girls, so are
Anacreon's and those of the other poets named, to boys, in most cases.
The following, preserved by Athenaeus (XIII., 564D), is a good
specimen:

[Greek:
"O pai parthenion blepon,
dixemai se, su d' ou koeis,
ouk eidos hoti taes emaes
psuchaes haeniocheueis."]

Such a poem, even if addressed properly, would indicate nothing more
than simple admiration and a longing which is specified in the
following:

[Greek:
Alla propine
radinous, o phile, maerous.]

It would hardly be worth while, even if the limitations of space
permitted, to subject the fragments of the other poets of this period
to analysis. The reader has the key in his hands now--the altruistic
and supersensual ingredients of love pointed out in this volume; and
if he can find those ingredients in any of these poems, he will be
luckier than I have been. We may therefore pass on to the great tragic
poets of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.


WOMAN AND LOVE IN AESCHYLUS

In the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus is made to declare that he
had never introduced a woman in love into any of his plays--[Greek:
ouk oid' oudeis haentin erosan popt' epoiaesa gunaika]. He certainly
has not done so in any one of the seven plays which have survived of
the ninety that he wrote, according to Suidas; and Aristophanes would
not have put that expression in his mouth had it not been true of the
others, too. To us it seems extraordinary that an author should boast
of having kept out of his writings the element which constitutes the
greatest fascination of modern literature; but after reading his seven
surviving tragedies we do not wonder that Aeschylus should not have
introduced a woman in love, or a man either, in plays wherewith he
competed for the state prize on the solemn occasions of the great
festivals at Athens; for love of an exalted kind, worthy of such an
occasion, could not have existed in a community where such ideas
prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he
condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual
love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the
remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on the
latter.

An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial
reception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, when
he returns from the Trojan war. She calls the day of his return the
most joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him during
his long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fond
feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him
till the gushing fountains of her eyes have been exhausted. Indeed,
she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims,
"Pamper me not after the fashion of women, nor as though I were a
barbaric monarch.... I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god." But
ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine
talk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse--deadly hypocrisy.
In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuineness
and intensity of her "fond feelings" for her husband may be inferred
from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous
assault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over
him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead.
"And I glory in the deed" she afterwards declares, adding that it "has
long since been meditated."

Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a
new concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usual
Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he
really was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been
willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his
brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war. In the words of
the Chorus,

"Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter
to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a
woman, and as a first offering for the fleet: and the
chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her
supplications and her cries to her father, and her
maiden age. But after prayer her father bade the
ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid,
high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in
her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth,
a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles
and strength which allowed no vent to her cry."

The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but
it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.
Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was
still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of
which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his _Seven
against Thebes_:

"And for its women to be dragged away captives, alas!
alas! both the young and the aged, like horses by their
hair, while their vestments are rent about their
persons. And the emptied city cries aloud, while its
booty is wasted amid confused clamors.... And the cries
of children at the breast all bloody resound, and there
is rapine, sister of pell-mell confusion ... And young
female slaves have new sorrows ... so that they hope
for life's gloomy close to come, a guardian against
these all-mournful sorrows."

For women of rank alone is there any consideration--so long as they
are not among the captives; yet even queens are not honored as women,
but only as queens, that is, as the mothers or wives of kings. In _The
Persians_ the Chorus salutes Atossa in terms every one of which
emphasizes this point: "O queen, supreme of Persia's deep-waisted
matrons, aged mother of Xerxes, hail to thee! spouse to Darius,
consort of the Persians, god and mother of a god thou art," while
Clytaemnestra is saluted by the chorus in _Agamemnon_ in these words:
"I have came revering thy majesty, Clytaemnestra; for it is right to
honor the consort of a chieftain hero, when the monarch's throne has
been left empty."

We read in these plays of such unsympathetic things as a
"man-detesting host of Amazons;" of fifty virgins fleeing from
incestuous wedlock and all but one of them cutting their husbands'
throats at night with a sword; of the folly of marrying out of one's
own rank. In all Aeschylus there is on the other hand only one
noticeable reference to a genuine womanly quality--the injunction of
Danaus to his daughters to honor modesty more than life while they are
travelling among covetous men; an admonition much needed, since, as
Danaus adds--characterizing the coarseness and lack of chivalry of the
men--violence is sure to threaten them everywhere, "and on the
fair-formed beauty of virgins everyone that passes by sends forth a
melting dart from his eyes, overcome by desire." Masculine coarseness
and lack of chivalry are also revealed in such abuse of woman as
Aeschylus--in the favorite Greek manner, puts in the mouth of
Eteocles:

"O ye abominations of the wise. Neither in woes nor in
welcome prosperity may I be associated with woman-kind;
for when woman prevails, her audacity is more than one
can live with; and when affrighted she is still a
greater mischief to her home and city."


WOMAN AND LOVE IN SOPHOCLES

Unlike his predecessor, Sophocles did not hesitate, it seems, to bring
"a woman in love" on the stage. Not, it is true, in any one of the
seven plays which alone remain of the one hundred and twenty-three he
is said to have written. But there are in existence some fragments of
his _Phaedra_, which Rohde (31) and others are inclined to look on as
the "first tragedy of love." It has, however, nothing to do with what
we know as either romantic or conjugal love, but is simply the story
of the adulterous and incestuous infatuation of Phaedra for her
stepson Hippolytus. It is at the same time one of the many stories
illustrating the whimsical, hypocritical, and unchivalrous attitude of
the early Greeks of always making woman the sinful aggressor and
representing man as being coyly reserved (see Rohde, 34-35). The
infatuation of Phaedra is correctly described (_fr_., 611, 607 Dind.)
as a [Greek: Theaelatos nosos]--a maddening disease inflicted by an
angry goddess.

Among the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles there are three which