The Greeks were in the same boat. They did indeed distinguish between
two kinds of love, the sensual and the celestial, but--as we shall see
in detail in the special chapter devoted to them--they applied the
celestial kind only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love
between men and women. That love was considered impure and degrading,
a humiliating affliction of the mind, not for a moment comparable to
the friendship between men or the feelings that unite parents and
children. This is the view taken in Plato's writings, in Xenophon's
_Symposium_ and everywhere. In Plutarch's _Dialogue on Love_, written
five hundred years after Plato, one of the speakers ventures a faint
protest against the current notion that "there is no gust of
friendship or heavenly ravishment of mind," in the love for women; but
this is a decided innovation on the traditional Greek view, which is
thus brutally expressed by one of the interlocutors in the same
dialogue:
"True love has nothing to do with women, and I assert that
you who are passionately inclined toward women and maidens
do not love any more than flies love milk or bees honey, or
cooks the calves and birds whom they fatten in the dark....
The passion for women consists at the best in the gain of
sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty."
Another interlocutor sums up the Greek attitude in these words: "It
behooves respectable women neither to love nor to be loved."
Goethe had an aperçu of the absence of purity in Greek love when he
wrote, in his _Roman Elegies:_
In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten.
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.