Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he
knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery
that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness
America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of
Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans
because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less
masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them
because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the
education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few
Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such
accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long
imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a
woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]

Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the
Spartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. The
girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind
they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in
the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in
the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women
for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for
the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai
for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III.,
337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of
Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was
always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a
sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."


LITERATURE AND LIFE

Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same
time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they
are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual
relations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal love
which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book,
too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highly
educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their
family, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302)
that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary
mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true
love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or
reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this
predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as
were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment.
Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a
thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could
have differed from us only in their _ideas_ about love, and not in
their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the
review referred to,

"that individual women should not at all times have had the
power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted
respect.... So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can
never have been recently evolved. But our ideas _about_ our
emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very
much from one generation to another."

In the next paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt the
way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions
themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and in
this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of
my chapter "How Sentiments Change and Grow" is to show how men's
_ideas_ regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty,
chastity, incest, affect and modify their _feelings_ in relation to
them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection
made to my theory.[313]

Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but
dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung
up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a
degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment,
as we do. With such an _idea_ how could they have possibly _felt_
toward women as we do? With the _idea_ firmly implanted in their minds
that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they
have experienced that _emotional_ state of ecstatic adoration and
worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Of
necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from
such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they,
though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have
risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of
women; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance,
neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which
inspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They were
educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as
Winckelmann--himself a Greek in this respect--has remarked, "the
supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If the
healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy
modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to the
love of women? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so
great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising
women, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.

But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that
they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas,
as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteria
are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied
with sympathy and affection. That there was no gallantry and
self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188,
197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from
the heartless way in which the men treated the women--in life I mean,
not merely in literature--refusing to allow them the least liberty of
movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which
would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their
own account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot
exist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy,
and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures for
another.

Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek
literature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in the
world if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, and
Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while
on the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients of
love which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic value
at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled
to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of
Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings of
sensual love--including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and
despair---were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in
poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299). I say the Greeks of
Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose
capacities for love we still have to consider.


GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA

It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among the
champions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimental
and "modern." Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold of
literature. Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a host
with Euripides. Menander is the starting-point to others, while
Benecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventing
modern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon. The majority hesitate
to go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth century
before Christ, while some modestly content themselves with the
romancers of the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ--thus allowing
a latitude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.

We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to such
love as is recorded in the prose and verse of Classical Greece, and
having found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must now
examine briefly what traces of it may occur in the much-vaunted erotic
poems and stories of Greater Greece, notably the capital of Egypt in
the third century before Christ.

It is true that of the principal poets of the Alexandrian
school--Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius--only the last named
was probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their home
and sphere of influence, being attracted by the great library, which
contained all the treasures of Greek literature, and other inducements
which the Ptolemies held out to men of letters. Thus it is permissible
to speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek literature, all
the more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gave
this literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well as
otherwise, which tinged Greek writings from that time on.

In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only of
stories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories. Even the
relations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romantic
opportunities, are treated in an amazingly prosaic manner. An emphatic
change in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come to
Euripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and their
feelings more attention than they had previously received in
literature. Aristophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to his
indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the
New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlasting
Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.
Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them
that the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with following
the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages
again, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion from
that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their
hearts' content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorous
weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks
(107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their
loves.

The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths
undoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and their
imitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of the
Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who made
love (sensual love, I mean)--which had played so subordinate a rôle in
the old epics and tragedies--the central feature of interest, thus
setting a fashion which has continued without interruption to the
present day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of a
specialist (155): "Les Alexandrins n'ont pas inventé l'amour dans la
littérature ... mais ils ont créé la littérature de l'amour." Their
way of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets,
especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek
novelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton,
Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are
uncertain) of our era.

There is a "suprising similarity" in the descriptions of love-affairs
by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages
(145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fashion of German professors)
to detailed proof of his assertion. The substance of these pages, may,
however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads. In all these
writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the
lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious
festivals, as those were practically the only occasions where such
women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight,
no other being possible under circumstances that permit of no
prolonged courtship. (3) The youth is represented as having previously
felt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avenges
herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (4) The love
is mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5)
Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to
the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the
maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to
describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the
Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in
comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the
favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to
some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all
through pictures and statues--a characteristically Greek device, going
back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion of the lovers is a
genuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes them
neglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate with
blushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with the
beloved; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell their
woes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathize
with them. (15) The passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for
other cares, serving only to aggravate it. (16) Like Orientals, the
lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) The lover
cuts the beloved's name into trees, follows her footsteps, consults
the flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and at
the banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup.

Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses frankly
that it "embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplest
symptoms of love." But instead of drawing therefrom the obvious
inference that love which has no other symptoms than those is very far
from being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that
"in its _essential_ traits, this passion _is presumably_ the same at
all times and with all nations."[314]


ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY.

It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that,
according to Helbig (194), "we first meet traits that suggest the
adoration of women (_Frauencultus_) and gallantry." This opinion is
widely prevalent, a special instance being that ecstatic exclamation
of Professor Ebers: "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?" In reality this act was
inspired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connection with
love.

The story in brief is as follows: Shortly after his marriage to
Berenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria. To insure his safe
return to Egypt Berenice vowed to consecrate her beautiful hair to
Venus. On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple; but on the
following day her hair could not be found. To console the king and the
queen, and to _conciliate the royal favor_, the astronomer Conon
declared that the locks of Berenice had been removed by divine
interposition and transferred to the skies in the form of a
constellation.[315]

A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian "gallantry" is to be
found in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets were
called upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of her
locks. The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course,
make the slightest difference in this kind of homage.

Unlike his colleagues, Rohde was not misled into accepting such
_adulation of queens_ as evidence of _adoration of women in general_.
In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend to
all students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness and
artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordained
that poems should be addressed to women of exalted rank:

"As the queens were, like the kings, enrolled among the
gods, the court-poets, of course, were not allowed to
neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon
to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the
extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of
bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus
in his elegy--so well-known through the imitation of
Catullus--on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the
constellations by the courtesy of the astronomer Conon."

He then proceeds to explain that we must be careful
not to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed the
freedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments.

"In actual life a certain chivalrous attitude toward women
existed at most toward hetairai, in which case, as a matter
of course, it was adulterated with a very unpleasant
ingredient of frivolous sentimentality.... Of an essential
change in the position of respectable girls and women there
is no indication."

Though there were a number of learned viragoes, there is "absolutely
no evidence" that women in general received the compliment and benefit
of an education. The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those of
Propertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed only
to the wanton hetairai. As late as our first century Plutarch felt
called upon to write a treatise, oti kai gunaikas paideuteon--"that
women too should be educated." Cornelius Nepos still speaks of the
gynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time.

"In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the
seclusion of their jealous confinement would have implied a
revolution in all social arrangements of the Greeks of which
we have no intimation anywhere,"

including Alexandria (69). In another chapter, Rohde comments
(354-356) with documentary proof, on the "extraordinary tenacity,"
with which the Greeks down to the latest periods of their literature,
clung to their custom of regarding and treating women as inferiors and
servants--a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalry
and adoration. That sympathy also--and consequently true, altruistic
affection--continued to be wanting in their emotional life is
indicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that "the most
palpable mark of a higher respect," an education, was withheld from
the women to the end of the Hellenic period.[317]


THE NEW COMEDY

Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period both in Egypt
and in Greece (Menander and the New Comedy) is that a regard for
purity enters as a new element into its literature. It does, in some
instances, less, however, as a virtue than as a _bonne bouche_ for
epicures,[318] as is made most patent in that offshoot of the
Alexandrian manner, the abominably _raffiné_ story of Daphnis and
Chloe. There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling of
the passion of love" of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found
any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favorite
usage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greek
literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its
coarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural. The old
epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though
Euripides set a bad example in his _Hippolytus_, and still more his
_Aeolus_, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularly
admired and imitated by the later writers.[319] Aristophanes is
proverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity. Concerning the
plays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments have
come down to us and Latin versions of several by Terence and Plautus),
Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by one
bond--love; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, and
always involving a hetaira or at most a [Greek: pseudokorae] or
_demie-vierge_, since respectable girls could not be involved in
realistic Greek love-affairs.

Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegance
with which Menander covers up his moral rottenness, and which made him
the favorite of the _jeunesse dorée_ of his time, exerted a bad
influence on the stage through many centuries. There are a few
quasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, but
they are not supported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphere
of sentimentality into that of sentiment. Here again I may adduce
Rohde as an unbiassed witness. While declaring that there is "a
longing for the ennobling of the passion in actual life" he admits
that

"really _sentimental effusions_ of love are strikingly rare
in Plautus and Terence.[320] One might think the authors of
the Latin versions had omitted the sentimental passages,
were it not that in the remnants of the Newer Comedy of the
Attic writers themselves there are, apart from general
references to Eros, no traces whatever of sentimental
allusions."[321]


THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS

Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whether
we can find a purer and more genuinely romantic atmosphere in the
works of her leading poets. Of these the first in time and fame is
Theocritus. He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love; and he
does resemble Sappho in two respects. Like her, he often glorifies
unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third
Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the
original to throw the whole book away in disgust. Like Sappho and the
Hindoos (and some modern Critics) he also seems to imagine that the
chief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, as
we see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl, of which I have already
spoken (116). Lines 87-88 of Idyl I., lines 139-142 of Idyl II., and
the whole of Idyl XXVII., practically sum up the conception of love
prevailing in the bucolic school of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus,
except that Theocritus has an idea of the value of coyness and
jealousy as stimulants of passion, as Idyl VI. shows. Crude coyness
and rude jealousy no doubt were known also to the rustic folk he sings
about; but when he makes that ugly, clumsy, one-eyed monster, the
Cyclops Polyphemus, fall in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (Idyl XI.)
and lament that he was not born with fins that he might dive and kiss
her hand if his lips she refused, he applies Alexandrian
pseudo-gallantry to pastoral conditions where they are ludicrously out
of place. The kind of "gallantry" really to be expected under these
conditions is realistically indicated in Idyl XIV., where Aeschines,
after declaring that he shall go mad some day because the beautiful
Cyniska flouted him, tells his friend how, in a fit of jealousy, he
had struck the girl on the cheek twice with clenched fist, while she
was sitting at his own table. Thereupon she left him, and now he
laments: "If I could only find a cure for my love!"

Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) in
which Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear to
him as his goats. In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal of
Sicilian pastoral love; nor is there a line which indicates that
Theocritus himself knew any higher phases of love than those which he
embodies in his shepherds. In a writer who has so many poetic
charms[322] this may seem strange, but it simply bears out my theory
that romantic love is one of the latest products of civilization--as
late as the love of romantic scenery, which we do not find in
Theocritus, though he writes charmingly of other kinds of scenery--of
cool fountains, shady groves, pastures with cattle, apple trees, and
other things that please the senses of man--as women do while they are
young and pretty.

Callimachus, the younger contemporary of Theocritus, is another
Alexandrian whose importance in the history of love has been
exaggerated. His fame rests chiefly on the story of Acontius and
Cydippe which occurred in the collection of legends and tales he had
brought together in his [Greek: Aitia]. His own version is now lost,
like most of his other works; and such fragments of the story as
remain would not suffice for the purpose of reconstruction were we not
aided by the two epistles which the lovers exchange with each other in
the _Heroides_ of Ovid, and more still by the prose version of
Aristaenetus, which appears to be quite literal, judging by the
correspondence of the text with some of the extant fragments of the
original.[323] The story can be related in a few lines. Acontius and
Cydippe are both very beautiful and have both been coy to others of
the opposite sex. As a punishment they are made to fall in love with
each other at first sight in the Temple of Diana. It is a law of this
temple that any vow made in it must be kept. To secure the girl,
Acontius therefore takes an apple, writes on it a vow that she will be
his bride and throws it at her feet. She picks it up, reads the vow
aloud and thus pledges herself. Her parents, some time after, want to
marry her to another man; three times the wedding arrangements are
made, but each time she falls ill. Finally the oracle at Delphi is
consulted, which declares that the girl's illness is due to her not
keeping her vow; whereupon explanations follow and the lovers are
united.

In the literary history of love this story may be allowed a
conspicuous place for the reason that, as Mahaffy remarks (_G.L. &
T._, 230), it is the first literary original of that sort of tale
which makes falling in love and happy marriage the beginning and the
end, while the obstacles to this union form the details of the plot.
Moreover, as Couat points out (145), the later Greek romances are mere
imitations of this Alexandrian elegy--Hero and Leander, Leucippe and
Clitophon, and other stories all recall it. But from my point of
view--the evolutionary and psychological--I cannot see that the story
told by Callimachus marks any advance. The lovers see each other only
a moment in the temple; they do not meet afterward, there is no real
courtship, they have no chance to get acquainted with each other's
mind and character, and there is no indication whatever of
supersensual, altruistic affection. Nor was Callimachus the man from
whom one would have expected a new gospel of love. He was a dry old
librarian, without originality, a compiler of catalogues and legends,
etc.--eight hundred works all told--in which even the stories were
marred by details of pedantic erudition. Moreover, there is ample
evidence in the extant epigrams that he did not differ from his
contemporaries and predecessors in the theory and practice of love.
Instead of having the modern feeling of abhorrence toward any
suggestion of [Greek: paiderastia], he glorified it in the usual Greek
style. The fame he enjoyed as an erotic poet among the coarse and
unprincipled Roman bards does not redound to his credit, and he
himself tells us unmistakably what he means by love when he calls it a
[Greek: philopaida noson] and declares that fasting is a sure remedy
for it (_Epigr._, 47).


MEDEA AND JASON

Another writer of this period who has been unduly extolled for his
insight into the mysteries of love, is Apollonius Rhodius, concerning
whom Professor Murray goes so far as to say (382), that "for romantic
love on the higher side he is without a peer even in the age of
Theocritus."(!) He owes this fame to the story of Medea and Jason,
introduced in the third book of his version of the Argonautic
expedition (275 _seq_.). It begins in the old-fashioned way with Cupid
shooting his arrow at Medea's heart, in which forthwith the
destructive passion glows. Blushes and pallor alternate in her face,
and her breast heaves fast and deep as she incessantly stares at Jason
with flaming eyes. She remembers afterwards every detail about his
looks and dress, and how he sat and walked. Unlike all other men he
seemed to her. Tears run down her cheeks at the thought that he might
succumb in his combat with the two terrible bulls he will have to tame
before he can recover the Golden Fleece. Even in her dreams she
suffers tortures, if she is able to sleep at all. She is distracted by
conflicting desires. Should she give him the magic salve which would
protect his body from harm, or let him die, and die with him? Should
she give up her home, her family, her honor, for his sake and become
the topic of scandalous gossip? or should she end it all by committing
suicide? She is on the point of doing so when the thought of all the
joys of life makes her hesitate and change her mind. She resolves to
see Jason alone and give him the ointment. A secret meeting is
arranged in the temple of Hecate. She gets there first, and while
waiting every sound of footsteps makes her bosom heave. At last he
comes and at sight of him her cheek flames red, her eyes grow dim,
consciousness seems to leave her, and she is fixed to the ground
unable to move forward or backward. After Jason has spoken to her,
assuring her that the gods themselves would reward her for saving the
lives of so many brave men, she takes the salve from her bosom, and
she would have plucked her heart from it to give him had he asked for
it. The eyes of both are modestly turned to the ground, but when they
meet longing speaks from them. Then, after explaining to him the use
of the salve, she seizes his hand and begs him after he shall have
reached his home again, to remember her, as she will bear him in mind,
even against her parents' wishes. Should he forget her, she hopes
messengers will bring news of him, or that she herself may be able to
cross the seas and appear an unexpected guest to remind him how she
had saved him.

Such was the love of Medea, which historians have proclaimed such a
new thing in literature--"romantic love on the higher side." For my
part I cannot see in this description--in which no essential trait is
omitted--anything different from what we have found in Homer, in
Sappho, and in Euripides. The unwomanly lack of coyness which Medea
displays when she practically proposes to Jason, expecting him to
marry her out of gratitude, is copied after the Nausicäa of the
_Odyssey_. The flaming cheeks, dim eyes, loss of consciousness, and
paralysis are copied from Sappho; while the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides
furnished the model for the dwelling on the subjective symptoms of the
"pernicious passion of love." The stale trick too, of making this love
originate in a wound inflicted by Cupid's arrows is everlastingly
Greek; and so is the device of representing the woman alone as being
consumed by the flames of love. For Jason is about as unlike a modern
lover as a caricaturist could make him. His one idea is to save his
life and get the Fleece. "Necessity compels me to clasp your knees and
ask your aid," he exclaims when he meets her; and when she gives him
that broad hint "do not forget me; I shall never forget you," his
reply is a long story about his home. Not till after she has
threatened to visit him does he declare "But _should you_ come to my
home, you would be honored by all ... _in that case_ I hope you may
grace my bridal couch." And again in the fourth book he relates that
he is taking Medea home to be his wife "in accordance with her
wishes!" Without persiflage, his attitude may be summed up in these
words: "I come to you because I am in danger of my precious life. Help
me to get back the Golden Fleece and I promise you that, on condition
that I get home safe and sound, I will condescend to marry you." Is
this, perhaps, the "romantic love on the higher side" which Professor
Murray found in this story? But there is more to come.

Of the symptoms of love in Medea's heart described in the foregoing
paragraph not one rises above that egotistic gloating over the pangs
and joys of sensual infatuation which constitute one phase of
sentimentality; while the further progress of the story shows that
Medea had no idea whatever of sacrificing herself for Jason, but that
the one motive of her actions was the eager desire to possess him.
When the fugitives are being pursued closely, and the chivalrous
Argonauts, afraid to battle with a superior number, propose to retain
the Golden Fleece, but to give up Medea and let some other king decide
whether she is to be returned to her parents, it never occurs to her
that she might save her beloved by going back home. She wants to have
him at any cost, or to perish with him; so she reproaches him bitterly
for his ingratitude, and meditates the plan of setting fire to the
ships and burning him up with all the crew, as well as herself. He
tries to pacify her by protesting that he had not quite liked the plan
proposed himself, but had indorsed it only to gain time; whereupon she
suggests a way out of the dilemma pleasanter to herself, by advising
the Argonauts to inveigle her brother, who leads the pursuers, into
their power and assassinate him; which they promptly proceed to do,
while she stands by with averted eyes. It is with unconscious sarcasm
that Apollonius exclaims on the same page where all these details of
"romantic love on the higher side" are being unfolded: "Accursed Eros,
the world's most direful plague."


POETS AND HETAIRAI.

The one commendable feature which the stories of Acontius and Cydippe
and of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each case
is a respectable and pure maiden (see _Argon._, IV., 1018-1025). But,
although the later romance writers followed this example, it would be
a great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch of
virgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be "the necessary
starting-point of the love-romance in a refined society." Alexandrian
society was anything but refined in matters of love, and the trait
referred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in a
literature devoted chiefly to the hetairai. We see this especially
also in the epigrams of the period. It is astonishing, writes Couat
(173), how many of these are erotic; and "almost all," he adds, "are
addressed to courtesans or young boys." "Dans toutes l'auteur ne
chante que la beauté plastique et les plaisirs faciles; leur Cypris
est la Cypris [Greek: pandaemos], celle qui se vend à tout le monde."
In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Poseidippus and others,
he finds sentimentality but no sentiment; and on page 62 he sums up
Alexandria with French patness as a place "ou l'on faisait assidûment
des vers sur l'amour sans être amoureux"--"where they were ever
writing love-poems without ever being in love." But what repels modern
taste still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration is
the effeminate degradation of the masculine type most admired. Helbig,
who, in his book on _Campanische Wandmalerei_, enforces the testimony
of literature with the inferences that can be drawn from mural
paintings and vases, remarks (258) that the favorite poetic ideals of
the time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks and
long, soft tresses. Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thus
even Achilles by the bucolic poets. In later representations
indicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphemus no longer
as a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardless
youth.[324]

That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the advent of purity and
refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of
degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the
hetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they were
the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men,
and to some of them great honors were paid. In the time of Polybius
the most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls;
portrait statues of such were placed in temples and other public
places, by the side of those of generals and statesmen, and there were
few prominent men whose names were not associated with these
creatures.

The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these [Greek:
hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength
of this information I assumed, in _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_
(79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in
some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the
uneducated domestic women. A study of the original sources has now
convinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia no doubt was a
remarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself, Theodota is
visited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again,
and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira. Athenaeus
informs us that some of these women

"had a great opinion of themselves, paying attention to
education and spending a part of their time on literature;
so that they were very ready with their rejoinders and
replies;"

but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consist
chiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms.
Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, who
was famed for her repartee:

"Once, when a man came to see her and saw some eggs on a
dish, and said, 'Are these raw, Gnathaena, or boiled?' she
replied, 'They are made of brass, my boy.'" "On one
occasion, when some poor lovers of the daughter of Gnathaena
came to feast at her house, and threatened to throw it down,
saying that they had brought spades and mattocks on purpose;
'But,' said Gnathaena, 'if you had these implements, you
should have pawned them and brought some money with you.'"

The pictures of the utter degradation of the most famous
of the hetairai--Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by
Athenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages. Combined with the
revelations made in Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi], they
demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish
creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of
the men, even if the latter had been capable of it.

It is to such vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece and
Alexandria addressed their verses. And herein they were followed by
those of the Latins who may be regarded as imitators of the
Alexandrians--Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principal
erotic poets of Rome. They wrote all their love-poems to, for, or
about, a class of women corresponding to the Greek hetairai. Of Ovid I
have already spoken (189), and what I said of him practically applies
to the others. Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in his
mind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who is
forever writing love-poems without ever being really in love. With
Catullus the sensual passion at least is sincere. Yet even Professor
Sellar, who declares that he is, "with the exception perhaps of
Sappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love," is
obliged to admit that he "has not the romance and purity of modern
sentiment" (349, 22). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there
is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in
expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. "There was a
time," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, "when I loved you not as a
man loves his mistress, but _as a father loves his son or his
son-in-law_"!

Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,
Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem.
Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark of
effeminacy rather than of an improved manliness. His passion is
fickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressions
of unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than the
altiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus about
Alcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions. In a word,
his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment.
Morally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues. He began his poetic
career with a glorification of [Greek: paiderastia], and continued it
as an admirer of the most abandoned women. A French author who wrote a
history of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted a
chapter to Tibullus and his love-affairs.[325]


SHORT STORIES

A big volume might be filled with the short love-stories in prose or
verse scattered through a thousand years of Greek literature. But,
although some of them are quite romantic, I must emphatically
reiterate what I said in my first book (76)--that romantic love does
not appear in the writings of any Greek author and that the passion of
the desperately enamoured young people so often portrayed sprang
entirely from sensuality. One of the critics referred to at the
beginning of this chapter held me up to the ridicule of the British
public because I ignored such romantic love-stories as Orpheus and
Eurydice, Alcyone and Ceyx, Atalanta and Meleager, Cephalus and
Procris, and "a dozen others" which "any school girl" could tell me.
To begin with the one last named, the critic asks: "What can be said
against Cephalus and Procris?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told by
Antoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his _Metamorphoses_ ([Greek:
metamorphoseon synagogae]) it is one of the most abominable and
obscene stories ever penned even by a Greek. Some of the disgusting
details are omitted in the versions of Ovid and Hyginus, but in the
least offensive version that can be made the story runs thus:

Cephalus, having had experience of woman's unbridled
passion, doubts his wife's fidelity and, to test her,
disguises himself and offers her a bag of gold. At
first she refuses, but when he doubles the sum, she
submits, whereupon he throws away his disguise and
confronts her with her guilt. Covered with shame, she
flies. Afterward she cuts her hair like a man's,
changes her clothes so as to be unrecognizable, and
joins him in the chase. Being more successful than he,
she promises to teach him on a certain condition; and
on his assenting, she reveals her identity and accuses
him of being just as bad as she was. Another version
reads that after their reconciliation she suspected his
fidelity on hearing that he used to ascend a hill and
cry out "Come, Nephela, come" ([Greek: Nephelae] means
cloud). So she went and concealed herself on the hill
in a thicket, where her husband accidentally killed her
with his javelin.

Is this the kind of Greek "love-stories" that English school girls
learn by the dozen? Coarse as it is, the majority of these stories are
no better, being absolutely unfit for literal translation, which is
doubtless the reason why no publisher has ever brought out a
collection of Greek "love-stories." Of those referred to above none is
so objectionable as the tale of Cephalus and Procris, nor, on the
other hand, is any one of them in any way related to what we call