[1] The expression is, of course, an awkward one, for the word “romance,” like “chivalry,” embodies the old superstition that such feelings were a product of the Christian Middle Ages; but this and similar expressions are so generally used in this connection, that there is little real risk of misunderstanding, and I cannot think of anything better.
[2] Among the many arguments in favour of the social emancipation of women at the present day, I have never heard it suggested that such an emancipation would inevitably lead to an increase of chivalrous feelings on the part of men; the general view seems to be that it would have just the contrary effect.
[3] Very noticeable is the preponderance of goddesses in the Greek Pantheon. The powers of nature, whether of sea, mountain, river, or forest, were almost invariably incarnated in the form of women.
[4] This change, retrograde or not, according to taste, may be exactly paralleled from the social history of the Arabs.
[5] It is both instructive and amusing to compare this primitive ideal woman with the contemporary Greek woman, as Hesiod himself knew and described her. A striking passage is Op. 693 seqq., and others will be mentioned in the next few pages.
[6] That this was the general character of the erotic legends introduced into the celebrated “Catalogus” ascribed to Hesiod, seems shown by the remark in Serv. ad. Aen. vii. 268: “Hesiodus etiam περὶ των γυναικῶν inducit multas heroidas optasse nuptias virorum fortium”; cp. the whole note.
[7] The parallel view, that if a man wished to really love anyone, the only worthy object he could find would be another man, was doubtless, in part, the result of a similar line of argument, though its true origin must of course be sought in something more inspiring than mere contempt for women. A further examination of this side of the question will be made later on.
[8] Zeus pays ἄποινα to Tros for his son (cp. Hymn. Hom. iv. 210); that the golden shower in which he visited Danae means as much, is hardly a primitive notion. The argument in Ach. Tat. ii. 37 is ingenious, but scarcely convincing.
[9] This version of the relations between Zeus and Minos is at least as old as the Odyssey. Cp. Odyss. xix. 179; Athen. xiii. 601E.
[10] Hymn. Hom. iv. 247 seqq.
[11] The general view that the erotic version of this story is not the original seems to rest on the sole authority of Aesch. Cho. 613 seqq. Probably one version is as old as the other, the one being perhaps Dorian, the other Ionian. Aeschylus’ treatment of Dorian erotic legends will be touched upon later. (Infra, p. 42.)
[12] A man may sometimes commit suicide after the death of his lady; but that is a very different thing to dying because she declines to have anything more to do with him. Stories like that of Iphis and Anaxarete only appear at a very late period.
[13] Athen. xiv. 619C.
[14] Hermes. Leont. i. Fr. 3. (Ed. Bach.)
[15] Theocr. i. 82 seqq. Cp. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion, p. 212 seqq.
[16] Serv. ad Ecl. viii. 68.
[17] Theocr. vii. 72.
[18] The only real exceptions to this rule are, perhaps, Sappho and her followers!
[19] Theognis, 183; cp. Pseudo-Phocylides, 189. Very similar in spirit is Hesiod’s advice to the farmer to get
[20] That is to say, these feelings by themselves. As regards the first, no one, of course, would wish to deny that the sexual instinct, in its most sensual form, has often played a prominent part in what is unquestionably love-poetry; but the sexual instinct can never of itself supply the fundamental basis of the feeling necessary for the production of such poetry. Woman, regarded merely as a source of pleasure or convenience, can no more be an object of love than a bottle of brandy or a railway train.
[21] Cf. Hes. Op. 700, seqq. A comparison of that passage with the types mentioned in Simonides, i.e. the γυνὴ γηΐνη and the γυνὴ ἐξ ὄνου, would seem to show that the sense of δειπνόλοχος is not so much ‘fishing for invitations to dinner,’ i.e. fond of going out (so L. and S.), as ‘waylaying dinners,’ i.e. making havoc of the food, like Plautus’ ‘pernae pestis.’ Wastefulness in household matters was much more likely to ‘burn up’ a Greek husband, and bring him to a ‘cruel old age,’ than any amount of frivolity or flirtation. For the idea cp. Aristoph. Eccl. 226.
ἱμερόεντα sounds to a modern ear almost like bitter irony.
[23] Nor, for that matter, is the Hetaera, whom later writers manage so to idealise, treated with any more respect or courtesy than the wife. Cp. Archil. Fr. 142, 184; Hippon. Fr. 110, 111. In curious contrast to what may be called the ‘wife-poetry’ of the early Greeks is the pretty picture in Hesiod (Op. 517, seqq.) of the unmarried girl, sitting at home, in every sense of the words κακῶν ἄπειρος. But strangest of all is the touch where, falling unconsciously into a manner of speech that dated from a very different social state, he calls her
[24] “But even these are as nothing compared to the real gush of feeling when he describes his youthful passions, his love for Neobule, passing the Homeric love of women. Here he has anticipated Sappho and Alcaeus, &c.”—Mahaffy, Class. Gr. Lit. i. p. 160.
[25] Perhaps Glaucus, for there is at least as much reason for supposing that Glaucus was the object of Archilochus’ affection as that he was the object of his scorn. To see in him a prototype of the Egnatius of Catullus, as, for instance, Lafaye does (Catulle et ses Modèles, p. 29), is quite unwarranted by any evidence; for the epithet κεροπλάστης of Fr. 57 is not necessarily derogatory, while the tone of such passages as Fr. 54, 70, is certainly not that of invective.
[26] Fr. 100-3, 106-7, 109-10, 116.
[27] It may further be observed that the passage is to all appearances descriptive of the emotions of some person other than the writer himself, and there is certainly no reason to suppose that it was addressed to the woman in question. The difference between describing such an emotion generally, and describing it as one’s own, to the person who causes it, need hardly be dwelt upon.
[28] Cp. Fr. 71, 72.
[29] To endeavour, as some have done, to reconstruct the satires of Archilochus from those of Catullus, is simply labour thrown away, because between the periods in which the two poets lived, the whole way of regarding women had been revolutionised, and ideas which seemed obvious to the Latin writer would have been unintelligible to the Greek. To Catullus thwarted love was an agony; to Archilochus it was an insult, and no man of his time would, or could, have regarded it otherwise. Thus, to suppose, as Lafaye (op. cit. l.c.) does, that the satires of Archilochus were interspersed with erotic passages, like Catull. xxxix. (a poem he considers to be imitated from Archilochus), is to suppose an anachronism.
[30] His date, and the general character of his poems, make it more convenient to consider him here, than among the other choral lyric writers, of whom we shall speak later.
[31] Ἀρχύτας δὲ ὁ ἁρμονικός, ὥς φησι Χαμαιλέων, Ἀλκμᾶνα γεγονέναι τῶν ἐρωτικῶν μελῶν ἡγεμόνα, καὶ ἐκδοῦναι πρῶτον μέλος ἀκόλαστον, (ἀκόλαστον) ὄντα καὶ περὶ τὰς γυναῖκας, καὶ τὴν τοιαύτην μοῦσαν (εἰσαγαγεῖν) εἰς τὰς διατριβάς.
Athen. xiii. 600 F.
(The reading is uncertain.)
[32] It is noteworthy that Archytas (ap. Athen. l.c.), when wishing to illustrate Alcman’s love for this lady, can quote nothing more pointed than the lines
[33] The fragments which may with some confidence be assigned to these, probably early, poems, are 29 and 94. Besides this, the mention of Tantalus (87, to which belongs 100) may well have been introduced by the story of Ganymede; that of Niobe’s children (109) by the story of those loves of theirs of which Sophocles afterwards wrote. The expression ἐν Θεσσαλίῳ κλείτει (85) might well in such a poem have had reference to Apollo and Admetus, whose love is held up as a model, like that of the lovers in Theocritus xii. But most striking of all, perhaps, to the modern reader, is the feeling that prompts Alcman to speak of the Spartan girls as his “female boy-friends.” (καὶ Ἀλκμὰν τὰς ἐπεράστους κόρας ἀΐτας λέγει. Hypoth. ad Theocr. xii.)
[34] Aristides ii. p. 40, Dind.
[35] Cp. Fr. 26.
[36] Alcman seems somehow to speak of girls like an old man. To think of him so, renders far more natural the charming gallantry of his lines on Agido, or the ὑποκορισμός with which his maidens speak, or his confessions of how he likes his dinner served. One can think of those Spartan girls laughing at their old Lydian dancing-master, as they ran away down to the “baths of Eurotas,” while he went slowly home and made them immortal.
[37] Anyhow, not in primitive times. One must go a long way down the history of erotic poetry to find a “love-poet” who praises two ladies with such impartiality as Alcman does Agido and Agesichora.
[38] Cp. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion, p. 47 seqq.
[39] That the love thus generally recommended was purely sensual, goes without saying; the first two or three lines of the first fragment are proof enough of this.
In Fr. 1, l. 3, μείλιχα δῶρα is not very satisfactory, somehow. The passage in Hymn. Hom. x. 2, where the expression occurs again, is not quite parallel. In a less primitive poet, one would write without hesitation μείλιχ’ ἄδωρα. For this use of μείλιχα cp. Pind. Olymp. i. 49, and for the thought Anth. Pal. v. 29, &c., &c. Line 4 again might begin ἄνθε’ ἐπεί γ’ ἥβης.
[40] Leont. iii. 37, of which passage Poseidippus was doubtless thinking in his epigram Anth. Pal. xii. 168.
[41] Leont. iii. 27 seqq. 47 seqq. &c.
[42] Suidas, it may be remarked, flatly contradicts one half of this view when he says of Mimnermus ἔγραψε βιβλία πολλά.
[43] It is hardly justifiable to infer from the passage of Alexander Aetolus ap. Athen. xv. 699 C, that Mimnermus addressed love-poems to boys.
[44] It is as a philosopher that Horace (Ep. i. 6, 65) cites his opinion:
“censet,” the regular word for a philosopher. It is further worth noticing that the Roman poets, when they mention Mimnermus, speak of him as the inventor of the elegiac metre, not as an erotic poet. Cp. e.g. Prop. i. 9, 11.
[45] That the ancients already recognised the importance of this particular feature in Anacreon is shown inter alia by the emphasis laid upon it by Critias (ap. Athen. xiii. 600 D).
[46] Vide e.g. Athen. xii. 540 E.
[47] Striking instances of this are to be found in Fr. 13, 76, etc.
[48] That this tone was specially characteristic of the poems addressed to women, if not actually confined to these, is shown by the contrast which the ancient critics made between Anacreon’s two styles of poetry. Cp. Plut. Amor. 4, and infra p. 86.
[49] The arguments of Reitzenstein, Epig. u. Skol. p. 81 seqq., to prove that its date is not later than circa 400, are not very convincing.
[50] Vide Reitzenstein, op. cit. p. 52 seqq.
[51] The exceptions would be the late “sophistical” pieces, such as that in praise of wealth, 699 seqq. etc.
[52] It may be argued that in a work intended “for the use of schools” the erotic passages would naturally be cut out. But even granted that this collection was made for the use of schools, the system of expurgation, which, while striking out the passages dealing with women, has left what would nowadays be considered so much more objectionable, is in itself sufficiently noteworthy. The next schoolmaster who undertakes a school edition of Theocritus may lay this to heart.
[53] How different is the treatment of boy-love both in Book I. and also in Book II., which is specially devoted to it, will be dwelt upon later. [p. 88.]
[54] Vide Excursus A.
[55] Cp. Aristoph. Vesp. 1217 seqq.
[56] The only exception, rather an interesting one, is Scol. 20, which, evidently modelled on the one that precedes it, is the answer of a woman-lover. But here again the vagueness (merely καλὴ γυνή, anyone will do) shows what the singer means.
[57] Perhaps, too, those of Althaea (in the Syotherae) and Medea (Fr. 54).
[58] Fr. 68; to the same poem evidently belongs Fr. 85.
[59] There is really no adequate reason for disbelieving the story in Ptol. Hephaest. iv. (Gale, Hist. poet. script. ant. p. 320; cf. Bergk. ad Stesich. Fr. 26.) What that story seems to imply is that Helen of Himera deserted the poet, who was thereby induced to moralise on the innate faithlessness of Helens in general. A subsequent reconciliation with the lady in question then led to the celebrated apology. The greater influence which women seem to have had over old men than over young, will already have been noticed in the cases of Alcman and Anacreon. The phenomenon could easily be explained, if it were necessary to explain it.—Vide e.g. Eur. Suppl. 1098 seqq.
[60] That in the original form of the legend Daphnis refuses to yield to love, and dies sooner than submit, has been shown by Reitzenstein, Epig. u. Skol. p. 193 seqq.
But the passage from Aelian (Var. Hist. x. 18) never says that Stesichorus told the story of Daphnis. It says he wrote bucolic poetry, which is not necessarily the same thing. If only Theocritus, who wrote bucolic poetry, had told some more of the story of Daphnis, the necessity of reading a great quantity of literature on the subject would have been spared us.
[61] It is rather tempting to think of this story as a Greek version of Tristan and Isolde. Rhadina is going from Samos to be married to the King of Corinth, and travels out with her cousin Leontichus on the same ship. There the fatal mischief is done; they separate for a while, but the charm is irresistible, and her lover hurries from Delphi to meet his death at the hands of the Corinthian “King Marc.”
[62] The name of Cycnus seems at first sight suggestive, but the story as related in the Scholiast on Pindar unfortunately proves nothing.
[63] He seems to have discussed or commented on the habits of the Spartan ladies (Fr. 61), but whether to praise or blame we do not know.
[64] e.g. Fr. 37, where he makes Achilles marry Medea; or Fr. 38, where Hermione becomes the wife of Diomed.
[65] Fr. 13, ad fin. The Ἐρωτικά of Bacchylides are not very elevated in character, but they are interesting as furnishing what is, perhaps, the first complimentary notice of the ἑταίρα in literature. (Fr. 24.)
[66] The Sicilian Telestes makes rather an interesting remark about Athene when she throws away the flute because it spoils her looks:
But, as we have already seen, men took more interest in women in Magna Graecia than in Greece itself.
[67] The Phaedra, Oenomaus, and perhaps the Colchides.
[68] Among the extant plays there is only the Hippolytus, and even in this, probably to the Greek mind a great part of the interest centred in the relations between Hippolytus and Theseus, and in their argument, where both start from the assumption that it would be absurd to suppose that the former could possibly have been in love with Phaedra. Of the lost plays it is hard to speak with confidence, but certainly the Andromeda, Phoenix, and Aeolus, seem to have been the only three in which the love element was at all the leading motive. The heroine of the Meleager was probably Althaea, not Atalanta. The Stheneboea merely describes the vengeance of Bellerophon for the treachery of his hosts. In the Antigone the “love-story” has all taken place before the action begins. Of the Alcestis and the Protesilaus we shall speak elsewhere, pp. 57, 99.
[69] That is to say, two only in which it furnished the main interest. That it lent a peculiar character to various other tragedies will be shown further on.
[70] Cp. what has been said above (p. 35) in the case of Ibycus; the parallel is a remarkable and important one.
[71] The statement to this effect in Aristoph. Ran. 1044, is so definite that it seems necessary to infer from it that, in spite of the words in Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. i. 773, the erotic incident in the Hypsipyle was very little emphasised.
[72] Suppl. 996 seqq.
[73] Theb. 182 seqq.
To his views as to the physical unimportance of the mother, as compared with the father (e.g. Eum. 657 seqq.), I shall have occasion to refer later. See Excursus. [This Excursus does not seem to have been written.]
[76] How far Aeschylus has followed the Oresteia of Stesichorus, and how far he has modified it, cannot now be known; but it seems reasonable to suppose that, in all probability, the Clytemnestra of the latter poet was a good deal more in love with Aegisthus than is the Clytemnestra of the former. This would explain some incongruities in the Aeschylean character, such as her sudden protestations of affection for Aegisthus when dead, after her apparent indifference to him when living. (Cho. 893, etc.) That she should kill Agamemnon out of revenge for the death of Iphigeneia and through jealousy of Cassandra, are perhaps additions of Aeschylus, to whose Athenian mind it seemed impossible that a woman should murder her husband merely because she was fond of another man.
[77] One may say, of course, if one likes, that this is all ironical, that she does not mean it, and that in reality she is as jealous as anyone else could be, as her subsequent actions show. Personally, I do not believe that the passage is meant to be in the least ironical; the absence of jealousy is always a feature of the model wife (cp. Eur. And. 222, and numerous similar passages); but even if this be granted, it makes no difference to the point at all. Whatever the audience are to think, the characters on the stage are supposed to take her seriously; and this fact throws a sufficient light on what was then thought to be the duty of a loving wife.
It is satisfactory to notice that neither does Heracles attach any undue importance to Iole. In his last words to Hyllus, after elaborate instructions as to how his funeral-pyre is to be built, he adds casually—
“Just marry Iole for me, will you?” (l. 1216.)
[78] In this same play, the reader must be careful not to misunderstand the motives of Haemon’s suicide. He does not kill himself out of grief for Antigone, but out of shame (αὑτῷ χολωθείς) at having attacked his father. That love for a woman should have made him so far forget himself was a disgrace not to be borne.
[79] The words of l. 144 seqq. at once suggest Catullus lxii. esp. 39 seqq. But this poem of Catullus is generally admitted to be, if not an actual translation, at least a paraphrase of Sappho; hence it is far more probable that Sophocles copied Sappho here, than that Catullus copied Sophocles there.
Another instance in which a tragedian copied an Epithalamium of Sappho is furnished by Aesch. Suppl. 998. Cp. Sappho Fr. 91, Longus Past. 3, 33, and my Apospasmata Critica (Oxford, Blackwell, 1892), p. 5.
[80] A great deal of light would be thrown on all this intricate subject if only one could find out how far, if at all, Sophocles was influenced by Euripides. Euripides, as we shall see later, was always ready to sympathise with women who suffered from the unreasonable treatment of the time, but it does not seem prima facie probable that this particular trait should have had influence on anyone so Athenian as Sophocles. Anyhow, these two passages prove nothing.
[81] This is exactly the idea of the well-known Ἔρως chorus in the Antigone. (l. 781). There, too, love is unavoidable (καί σ’ οὔτ’ ἀθανάτων φύξιμος οὐδεὶς, οὔθ’ ἁμερίων σέ γ’ ἀνθρώπων), it results in madness (ὁ δ’ ἔχων μέμηνεν, “the stricken one is mad,” as the Romans said “habet” of their gladiators), and the chief damage it does is to property (ὃς ἐν κτήμασι, πίπτεις). Like Eresichthon’s father, what the Chorus most object to is the expense.
[83] Vide Excursus B.
[84] This feature is of course by no means peculiar to Sophocles; it is prominent both in Aeschylus and Euripides (e.g. the pathetic passage in Orest. 1041 seqq.), and doubtless for the same reason. In Sophocles, however, perhaps owing merely to the chance which has preserved certain plays while others have been lost, it plays a particularly important part. Not only are the Antigone and the Electra almost entirely devoted to it, but the one ray of light in the 1800 lines of the Oedipus Coloneus is the farewell of Polynices to his sister. (l. 1414 seqq.)
[85] Soph. Ant. 909 seqq. This seems the natural and obvious way of taking these words, but whichever way one takes them they do not imply any very great respect for matrimony.
Whether the lines are Sophocles’ or not is of course indifferent in this connection, as everyone is agreed that, if an interpolation, they are a very early one.
[86] This is not, I think, saying too much. A story like that of Canace, however powerfully it might affect its audience, was, after all, even in later times, looked upon as something quite exceptional in Greece. (Cp. the later Athenian view on the subject as illustrated by Plaut. Epid. v. i. 45, seqq.)
[87] It is worth while, however, to notice that even the women themselves in Aristophanes are made to confess that this so-called misogyny is, in truth, merely realism. Cp. e.g. Aristoph. Thesm. 389 seqq., Eccl. 214 seqq.
[88] e.g. Fr. 822, etc.
[89] Fr. 321.
[90] Hipp. 373 seqq. Tempting as it is to take this passage as ironical, it would almost certainly be wrong to do so.
[91] Hec. 342 seqq.
[92] See Excursus C. It is true that in the intrigue of Macareus and Canace there is some reason to believe that the former was, contrary to the usual habit of these legends, the leading spirit; but in the Aeolus of Euripides this beginning of the story seems to have only been alluded to in the prologue, and not to have formed part of the action.—Cp. Antiphanes, Aeol. Fr. 1.
[93] The most striking example is perhaps the Iphigeneia in Aulis, but there are plenty of others.
Instances in which women are represented as in love with men are somewhat commoner, as they were commoner in the legends; but the part they play in Euripides, as a whole, has been greatly exaggerated. Cp. p. 38.
[94] ἤρων· τὸ μαίνεσθαι δ’ ἄρ’ ἦν ἔρως βροτοῖς.—Fr. 161 (Antigone). Cp. Hipp. 443 seqq.
[95] Suidas (s.v. Ἀναγυράσιος) τούτου δὲ (τοῦ θεοῦ) ἐξέκοψέ τις τὸ ἄλσος· ὁ δὲ τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ ἐπέμηνε τὴν παλλακήν ... ἱστορεῖ δὲ Ἱερώνυμος ἐν τῷ περὶ τραγῳδοποιῶν, ἀπεικάζων τούτοις τὸν Εὐριπίδου Φοίνικα. Cp. id. s.v. ἐναύειν. Vide Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 621.
[96] The difference is described with wonderful force by Maximus Tyrius (xxv. 4): ὁ μὲν ἐφ’ ἡδονὴν οἰστρεῖ, ὁ δὲ κάλλους ἐρᾶ· ὁ μὲν ἄκων νοσεῖ, ὁ δὲ ἑκὼν ἐρᾷ· ὁ μὲν ἐπ’ ἀγαθῷ ἐρᾷ τοῦ ἐρωμένου, ὁ δὲ ἐπ’ ὀλέθρῳ ἀμφοῖν.—I have spoken here merely of women because we have so little absolute evidence as to men, but what little we have all goes to prove that their view of “love” was at least as sensual as that of the women, and if anything even more brutal; and, anyhow, there is no evidence of the contrary. It is very hard satisfactorily to compare Euripides with people like Asclepiades, who are the earliest representatives we know of the modern spirit, for this very reason, that while the former nearly always discusses the matter from the point of view of the woman, the latter do so with almost equal regularity, as far as we can now judge, from the point of view of the man. One thing, however, is clear enough at the very outset. While Euripides regards the relation between man and woman as entirely based on the sexual instinct, the Alexandrians have from the first imported into it that further feeling of comradeship and mutual self-sacrifice which had before been peculiar to the relation between man and man. For obvious reasons this great change first became noticeable on the side of the man (for the influence of Sappho’s school had probably by this time become inappreciable), but its effects are evident enough as soon as the Alexandrians begin to talk of a woman’s love. The difference between, say, the Medea of Apollonius and the most refined heroine of the Attic drama is one, not of degree, but of kind.