Chapter 79

[313] A homely but striking illustration may here be added. In Africa the negroes are proud of their complexion and look with aversion on a white skin. In the United States, knowing that a black skin is looked down on as a symbol of slavery or inferiority, they are ashamed of it. The wife of an eminent Southern judge informed me that Georgia negroes believe that in heaven they will be white; and I have heard of one negro woman who declared that if she could become white by being flayed she would gladly submit to the torture. Thus have _ideas_ regarding the complexion changed the _emotion_ of pride to the emotion of shame.

[314] Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts." He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds: "but they _must_ have known them all the same." To give one instance of his contradictory procedure. On page 70 he admits that, as women were situated, the tender and passionate courtship of the youths as described in poems and romances of the period "could hardly have been copied from life," because the Greek custom of allowing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting their wishes was incompatible with the poetry of such courting. "It is very significant," he adds, "that among the numerous references to the ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers, including those of the Hellenistic [Alexandrian] period, and collected by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 72 of his _Florilegium_, love is never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice." In the next sentence he declares nevertheless that "no one would be so foolish as to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this period;" and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in the literature of this period these traits _had not yet taken hold of the life of these men_, though there were _longings_ for them. And at the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back-down by declaring that "the very essence of sentimental poetry is the _longing for what does not exist_." (_Ist doch das rechte Element gerade der sentimentalen Poesie die Sehnsucht nach dem nicht Vorhandenen_.) What makes this admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of "sentimental" elements, does not even use that word as the adjective of sentiment but of sentimentality. He defines this _Sentimentalität_ to which he refers as a "_ Sehnen, Sinnen und Hoffen_," a "_Selbstgenuss der Leidenschaft_"--a "longing, dreaming, and hoping," a "revelling in (literally, self-enjoying of) passion." In other words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion's sake, a gloating over one's selfish joys and sorrows. Now in this respect I actually go beyond Rohde as a champion of Greek love! Such _Sentimentalität_ existed, I am convinced, in Alexandrian life as well as in Alexandrian literature; but of the existence of true supersensual altruistic _sentiment_ I can find no evidence. The trouble with Rohde, as with so many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of the distinction between sensual love, which is selfish (_Selbstgenuss_) and romantic love, which is altruistic; hence he flounders in hopeless contradictions.

[315] See Anthon, 258, and the authors there referred to.

[316] See Theocritus, Idyll XVII. Regarding the silly and degrading adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature, see also Christ's _Griechische Litteraturgeschichte_, 493-494 and 507.

[317] I have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing. A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians. The _Andromeda_ of Euripides, he declares (23), "became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure assumption on his part, not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved. Benecke has devoted a special "Excursus" to this play (203-205), in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature "need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides's day is the conception of the '_galante Ritter_' setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. "Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster _if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry_. The contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his _History of Greek Literature_, remarks with comic naïveté: "The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice? Was not _Alcestis_ written to enforce that principle of conduct? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modern ideas of chivalrous love?

Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had passed away, was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is "the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife--a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon--and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.

[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:

[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].

[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by preference incestuous passions, "and it appears that such passions were not rare in actual life too in those times."

[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., _Asin._, III., 3, particularly v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that "a very sentimental character is Charinus in the _Mercator_;" and he also points to Ter., _Eun._, 193 ff.

[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of sentimentality--altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery--there is enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of life. But when, in the third act of the _Asinaria_, the lover says to his girl, "If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours," we promptly ask, "_Would he have done it_?" And the answer, from all we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus: "_Now_ you promise me everything, but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a procuress. From the point of view of purity the _Captivi_ is particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue Plautus himself--who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin--makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which "there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira--which are the staple features of these later Greek plays.

[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too much offend modern taste.

[323] Couat, 142. There are reasons to believe that the epistles referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaenetus lived about the fifth century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost after surviving eight centuries.

[324] See also Helbig's Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of Greek art.

[325] Space permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets in detail, as well as the other Romans--Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, etc., who came less under Greek influence. But in truth such examination would be superfluous. Any one may pursue the investigation by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last seven of my ingredients of love--the altruistic-supersensual group--he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries. It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the Greeks, should have excelled them in the capacity for what is one of the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sentiments.

Before leaving the poets, I may add that the Greek _Anthology_, the basis of which was laid by Meleager, a contemporary of the Roman poets just referred to, contains a collection of short poems by many Greek writers, in which, of course, some of my critics have discovered romantic love. One of them wrote that "the poems of Meleager alone in the Greek _Anthology_ would suffice to refute the notion that Greece ignored romantic passion." If this critic will take the trouble to read these poems of Meleager in the original he will find that a disgustingly large number relate to [Greek: paiderastia], which in No. III. is expressly declared to be superior to the love for women; that most of the others relate to hetairai; and that not one of them--or one in the whole _Anthology_--comes up to my standard of romantic love.

[326] The best-known ancient story of "love-suicide" is that of Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus, having reason to think that Thisbe, with whom he had arranged a secret interview at the tomb of Ninus, has been devoured by a lion, stabs himself in despair, and Thisbe, on finding his body, plunges on to the same sword, still warm with his blood. This tale, which is probably of Babylonian origin, is related by Ovid (_Metamorph._, IV., 55-166), and was much admired and imitated in the Middle Ages. Comment on it would be superfluous after what I have written on pages 605-610.

[327] See Rohde, 130; Christ, 349.

[328] No more like stories of romantic love than these are the five "love-stories" written in the second century after Christ by Plutarch. This is the more remarkable as Plutarch was one of the few ancient writers to whom at any rate the _idea_ occurred that women _might be_ able to feel and inspire a love rising above the senses. This suggestion is what distinguishes his _Dialogue on Love_ most favorably from Plato's _Symposium_, which it otherwise, however, resembles strikingly in the peculiar notions regarding the relation of the sexes; showing how tenacious the unnatural Greek ideas were in Greek life. Plutarch's various writings show that though he had advanced notions compared with other Greeks, he was nearly as far from appreciating true femininity, chivalry, and romantic love as Lucian, who also wrote a dialogue on love in the old-fashioned manner.

[329] Hirschig's _Scriptores Erotici_ begins with Parthenius and includes Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon, Heliodorus, Chariton, etc. The right-hand column gives a literal translation into Latin.

[330] _Der Griechische Roman_, 432-67. An excrescence of this theory is the foolish story that "Bishop" Heliodorus, being called upon by a provincial synod either to destroy his erotic books or to abdicate his position, preferred the latter alternative. The date of the real Heliodorus is perhaps the end of the third or the first half of the fourth century after Christ.

[331] He refers in a footnote to such scenes as are painted in I., 32, 4; II., 9, 11; III., 14, 24, 3; IV., 6, 3--scones and hypocritically naïve experiments which he justly considers much more offensive than the notorious scene between Daphnis and Lykainion (III., 18).

[332] Rohde (516) tries to excuse Goethe for his ridiculous praise of this romance (Eckermann, II., 305, 318-321, 322) because he knew the story only in the French version of Amyot-Courier. But I find that this version retains most of the coarseness of the original, and I see no reason for seeking any other explanation of Goethe's attitude than his own indelicacy and obtuseness which, as I noted on page 208, made him go into ecstacies of admiration over a servant whom lust prompted to attempt rape and commit murder. As for Professor Murray, his remarks are explicable only on the assumption that he has never read this story in the original. This is not a violent assumption. Some years ago a prominent professor of literature, ancient and modern, in a leading American university, hearing me say one day that _Daphnis and Chloe_ was one of the most immoral stories ever written, asked in a tone of surprise: "Have you read it in the original?" Evidently _he_ never had! It is needless to add that translations never exceed the originals in impropriety and usually improve on them. The Rev. Rowland Smith, who prepared the English version for Bohn's Library, found himself obliged repeatedly to resort to Latin.

Apart from his coarseness, there is nothing in Longus's conception of love that goes beyond the ideas of the Alexandrians. Of the symptoms of true love--mental or sentimental, esthetic and sympathetic, altruistic and supersensual, he knows no more than Sappho did a thousand years before him. Indeed, in making lovers become indolent, cry out as if they had been beaten, and jump into rivers as if they were afire, he is even cruder and more absurd than Sappho was in her painting of sensual passion. His whole idea of love is summed up in what the old shepherd Philetas says to Daphnis and Chloe (II., 7): [Greek: _Egvov d' ego kai tauron erasthenta kai hos oistro plaegeis emukato, kai tragon philaesanta aiga kai aekolouthei pantachou. Autos men gar aemaen neos kai aerasthen Amarullidos_].

[333] See Rehde, 345; on Musaeus, 472, 133.

[334] Lucii Apulei _Metamorphoseon_, Libri XI., Ed. van der Vliet (_Teubner_), IV., 89-135.

[335] See the remarks on _Tristan and Isolde_ in my _Wagner and his Works_, II., 138.

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