It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in
1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics
bear the date of 1818. He may have also read Robert Wood's book
entitled _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_,
dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs:
"Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of
the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in
almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a
single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct
from sensual enjoyment, in the _Iliad_?"
This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern
literature. But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth
century I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding
the Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Théophile
Gautier. Shelley's ideas are confused and contradictory, but
interesting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and
poetic intuition. In his fragmentary discourse on "The Manners of the
Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love," which was intended to serve
as an introduction to Plato's _Symposium_, he remarks that the women
of the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed
"the habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably
not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such
disproportion in the attractions of the external form
between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists
among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of
that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the
acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment
animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the
lineaments and the gestures of every form which they
inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate
from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no
heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this
life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on
to say perversely:
"Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were
deprived of its legitimate object, that they were
incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is
the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times."