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]