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).