Or, according to a slightly different version found in “Peisander”:

The moral of both these stories is obvious. The behaviour of Laius towards Chrysippus was a crime deserving the most exemplary punishment.

Now this fact at once affords us a clue as to the real nature of Laius’ conduct. It seems impossible that the statement that Laius πρῶτος τὸν ἀθέμιστον ἔρωτα τοῦτον ἔσχεν can be taken to mean that he was the founder of love as between man and man in the same way as this is related of, for instance, Orpheus. It seems impossible to believe that any legend should have described the originator of that form of love with which, as we know, the highest thoughts and ideals of the early Greeks were so intimately associated, as a criminal worthy of divine punishment. Euripides himself might not have shrunk from such a course, but it does not seem conceivable that he should have found any existing legend on which to begin to work;[174] and it seems, therefore, unquestionable that the meaning of the story cannot have been this. As a matter of fact, a careful examination of such evidence as we have, affords every reason for believing that its meaning was a very different one.

The true meaning of the legend is this. Laius was the first to violate the universal law that the love between man and man must be pure; and it was this transgression that involved himself, his family, and his country in such universal ruin.

That this meaning is in itself a more likely one than the other, will probably not be disputed by anyone who has formed a true conception of early Greek feeling on the subject; more than this one cannot expect. But while actual proof on the point is impossible, it may not be inapposite to draw attention to the way in which the sensuality and unreasoning animalism of Laius are emphasised at every turn, with the view doubtless, in the first case, of preventing any conceivable misunderstanding of the true purport of the tradition.

In the play itself, the nature of his passion is shown only too clearly by the famous distichs (Fr. 840, 841):

Cicero says as much (Tusc. iv. 33, 71): Quis ... non intellegit quid apud Euripidem et loquatur et cupiat Laius? Aelian, too (N. H. vi. 15), draws an unconscious comparison between this play and the pure old-Greek Niobe of Sophocles when, after describing how the dolphin that loved a boy ἐπιβιῶναι τοῖς παιδικοῖς οὐκ ἐτόλμησεν, he adds, Λάϊος δὲ ἐπὶ Χρυσίππῳ, ὦ καλὲ Εὐριπίδη, τοῦτο οὐκ ἔδρασεν.

The sensuality of the passion is clearly shown, too, by various features of the legend as recorded by various writers, above all by the fact that Hera is the goddess outraged, and by the peculiar nature of the curse of Pelops. The actual words, moreover, of the Scholiast of the Phoenissae (τὸν Λάϊον ἀσεβήσαντα ἐς τὸν παράνομον ἔρωτα τοῦ Χρυσίππου) and of the argument of that play (καὶ συνῆν αὐτῷ τὰ ἐρωτικὰ πρῶτος ἐν ἀνθρώποις τὴν ἀρρενοφθορίαν εὑρών), seem all to point the same way.[175]

In fact, the sensuality of Laius is made such a feature of the story in every case in which it is narrated, that it cannot well be doubted that this sensuality was a feature of the story in its earliest form; and if this be granted, there can be very little question as to the meaning of the story itself, as originally current.

We thus have three plays, one by each of the great dramatists, dealing with this subject, two of them dwelling upon the intense and unselfish nature of the passion in its true form, the third emphasising the disastrous consequences of any transgression of that purity which was so integral a part of it; but are these three the only ones of their kind? They are the only three, perhaps, that dealt with the purely erotic side of the matter; but its general influence evidently extended over a far wider field. This influence makes itself felt in various ways and in varying degrees, and it would be a lengthy task, and one beside the present purpose, to endeavour to trace its workings wherever they are visible in Attic tragedy; but a few noticeable instances of it are well worthy of attention.

One of these is the Ajax of Sophocles. It is a common complaint against this play that the second half of it is inferior in interest to the first. The admirers of Sophocles, however, contend that, to an Athenian audience, the details of funeral arrangements were matters of such paramount importance that, in a play intended for the Athenian stage, a second act dealing entirely with this subject would not by any means be of the nature of an anti-climax. I am no great admirer of Sophocles, and still less am I an admirer of the mob that pelted Aeschylus and hooted Euripides, but yet I should be disposed to give the Athenians credit for rather higher tastes than this would seem to imply; while, even had the predilections of his audience been so strongly those of the undertaker, it might surely have been hoped that a poet of Sophocles’ genius would have had the courage to ignore them. Indeed, as long as the interest of the second half of the Ajax is considered as centred on the dead body of the hero, it is impossible successfully to refute the charge of bathos; but a more careful consideration of this part of the play will, perhaps, show that the interest is by no means intended to be attached in this Mezentius-like manner to a corpse. The interest is meant to centre on Teucer, the amasius of the dead Ajax,[176] and on his efforts to prove himself worthy of his heroic lover; for his lover’s sake, in spite of every obstacle, and in the face of what looks like certain death, he insists that due respect shall be paid to the dead; in fact, there are in this situation the germs of the situation which excites such general interest in the Antigone.[177] There the character whose weakness is made strength through love, is a woman, and so we moderns admire; here it is a man, and so we misunderstand; but it does not follow that the Greeks were equally narrow in their sympathies.

Another instance, less obvious at first sight, but equally convincing on nearer examination, is the Alcestis. The Alcestis is a very difficult play to understand, as far as the motives of its leading figures are concerned; nor is it enough to say that, because the play has been described as “something of a satyric drama,” therefore all its characters are meant to be grotesque. The self-concentration of Admetus and the complete acquiescence therein of Alcestis, must surely be capable of some more satisfactory explanation.[178] This explanation is, perhaps, to be found in the relation existing between Admetus and Apollo. The story of the love of Apollo for Admetus is sufficiently familiar,[179] and has been alluded to on various occasions in the preceding pages. Both at Athens and Sparta the legend seems to have been well known,[180] and there can be no doubt that an audience, when called upon to listen to a play dealing with Admetus, would instinctively call to mind this incident in his life.[181] Granted this, it is not, perhaps, too bold to say that it is equally unquestionable that this recollection on their part must have influenced their view of the hero’s character. He was unwilling to die; for any Greek to be unwilling to die was excusable in a way which we who live in English fogs can never understand; but for Admetus, the beloved of the Sun-god! If he, who for nine years had met Apollo face to face, shrank from the mould and the mud of Hades, what reason to wonder at it? To a Greek, to live was to see the sun; surely then, to one whom the Sun-god loved, life must be doubly precious, precious to a degree that less happy mortals could never comprehend.[182] Then, again, if one thought of who Admetus was. Surely the man whom the Sun-god loved was a man whom the world could not spare, a man for whom it was a privilege to be considered worthy to die. Patriotism, too, no less than personal affection, would seem to compel a sacrifice on behalf of the man in whose kingdom a god took such a special interest;[183] nor, again, was the gift of a divine lover a thing that it was safe lightly to put aside. All this, and much more of a kindred nature, must have been present in the minds of those who first saw this strange play, and must have served in part to mitigate its strangeness. It could not, perhaps, explain the central mystery; but then, the mystery of self-sacrifice has never been explained yet.

Another striking instance is the persistent way in which Orestes and Pylades figure in the Athenian drama. They play a prominent part in no fewer than five tragedies, in one of which, the Iphigeneia in Tauris, the scene between them became proverbial;[184] and thus we get repeated again and again the, to modern minds, almost grotesque situation of the intense affection between Orestes and Pylades, and the intense affection between Orestes and Electra,[185] and the supreme indifference between Pylades and Electra, the two lovers who are going to marry one another as soon as the curtain comes down. And yet, those who have read what has gone before will know that not only did this situation seem natural to the Athenian audience, but any other situation under the circumstances would have seemed to them monstrous or absurd.

It is hardly necessary to follow this subject further, for enough has been said already to make its main features perfectly clear. Still less is it necessary, for our present purpose, to study the history of this emotion during the succeeding centuries. As we have already pointed out, from the end of the fifth century onwards it begins to lose its hold on the popular imagination, and ceases to be a national institution; and when next we find traces of it in literature, we see at once that its nature has entirely altered. Paederastic poetry there is enough and to spare among the Alexandrians, but it is poetry which looks strange indeed by the side of Theognis.[186] What were the causes that led to this change, a change as great as that which about this time came over the relation between man and woman—how far it was due to Persian influence, how far to the employment of professional soldiers instead of the citizen-armies of an earlier period—all these are questions of the greatest interest in themselves, but they cannot be discussed here. The fact remains that that purity and self-devotion which had been the rule in one generation became the exception in the next, and that the downward course was never again fully arrested throughout classical times.

And yet, even the most sensual of the later poets, somehow, sometimes, when speaking of this, rise to strange heights of beauty. Listen to Rhianus:

Listen to Meleager, the last of the Greek poets:

The foregoing discussion has covered a quantity of ground and dealt with a large variety of topics, some of which may have appeared but remotely connected with our immediate subject; but in the end it has succeeded in establishing certain facts very clearly. We have learnt from an examination of such parts of the early Greek literature as have survived, and from a consideration of the probable nature of the rest, that

(1) Love in the modern sense, as existing between men and women, was unknown in early Greece.

(2) Such love on the part of men for men was not only a fact, but was generally recognised as a social, and in some cases a national, institution.

From this it would seem inevitably to follow, that the change which we find at a later period to have come over the way of regarding women, was due to a transference to the sexual instinct, and an amalgamation with it, of that form of emotion which had previously been confined to the mutual relations of men. In other words, men first began to look upon women as fit objects of pure and chivalrous devotion, when they began (to quote the expression of Alcman)[187] to look upon them as “female boy-friends.”

Now, my reason for calling attention to this point is the following: If one regards the origin of what, for briefness’ sake, we have called the romantic feeling, as entirely a new growth of the fourth century, unconnected with anything that had gone before, it is obvious that such a growth, if indeed possible at all, can only have been made possible by a simultaneous movement on the part of a large number of persons; for it is inconceivable that any one man, however great his influence, could invent and popularise an entirely new emotion. But if, on the other hand, we regard the romantic feeling as simply due to the readjustment of an already existing emotion, it is no longer absurd to suppose that the original suggestion of this readjustment may have been due to some single individual. Indeed, the probabilities rather point in that direction, for it is a commonplace that revolutions of thought are generally due to the discovery, on the part of some individual, of the apparently obvious formula for which the rest of mankind have long been seeking in vain. This being so, it will be justifiable to apply the general principle to the case before us, and it will no longer seem a fruitless task to look about among the literary names of the close of the fifth century and the beginning of the fourth, for the man who gave the first impulse to that remarkable movement with which we are at present concerned.

The great obstacle which here confronts us at the outset, and, indeed, makes this whole investigation one of exceptional difficulty, is the fact that, of all the periods of Greek poetry, that which covers the first part of the fourth century—in other words, that which forms the transition from the classical to the so-called Alexandrian era—is just that of which the fewest monuments of importance have been preserved. From the death of Aristophanes to the time when Asclepiades began to write is pretty well 70 years,[188] but all the poetry which has come down to us from this whole period consists of a few fragments of comedy,[189] most of which it is impossible even approximately to date, and a few epigrams, the history of which is often more obscure still. There is thus a great gap in our knowledge, and it is just during this interval of darkness that the romantic feeling must first have found expression, for while in Euripides, confessedly the most “modern” of the classical poets, no real trace of it is to be found,[190] in Asclepiades and his immediate contemporaries and followers we find it already so thoroughly established as a noteworthy factor in their work, that it is impossible to doubt that its origin must belong to a considerably earlier period. This being so, it is impossible to speak with any certainty. It seems, however, most probable that the initiation of the movement was due to Antimachus of Colophon.

Antimachus was a distinguished man in various ways. The author of an important critical edition of the text of the Homeric poems, he was himself an epic poet second only in the general estimation to Homer, and his Thebaid was still read and admired more than 500 years after his death.[191] But the work on which his present claim rests is his elegiac poem, Lyde. It may not be amiss briefly to recall the circumstances and nature of this poem.[192]

Antimachus, falling in love with some Lydian lady, married her, and went to live with her in her native country. Afterwards, on her death, he returned to Colophon, where he composed, in her memory, the elegy Lyde, a poem containing, in the form of digressions, accounts of most of the unhappy lovers of tradition or mythology.[193]

Now, in this there are two features which it is impossible to parallel in any previous Greek poem. The Lyde of Antimachus was a love-poem addressed to his wife, and written after her death. In these two facts we recognise, on the part of the writer, a view both of married life and of women in general, which is entirely new. Mimnermus had said that life without love was not worth living, but his was hardly the love to last after his lady’s death. Simonides had sung the charms of the ideal housekeeper, but one would not expect to find emotional poetry addressed even to the most perfect housekeeper, as such. Euripides had expatiated on the powers and the capabilities of women; but there is a difference between regarding a woman as a particularly cunning and dangerous sort of beast, and regarding her as a fit object for a life’s devotion. In Antimachus, for the first time, we meet with the new spirit which animates the new literature and forms the foundation of the Greek romantic conception; for it is respect for women and, above all, for marriage, that constitutes the fundamental principle of the romantic feeling throughout the later Greek poetry.[194] It was this spirit which rendered possible the artistic treatment of the story of Acontius and Cydippe, and the growth of the novel, with its one inviolable canon that, whatever trials or temptations might befall them, the two lovers must throughout remain pure and faithful to one another.[195] It was this that rendered possible the New Comedy, with its endless variations on the ever-fresh theme of the unhappy lover, made happy at the last by marriage with his lady.[196] It was this that rendered possible the Battis of Philetas and the Leontium of Hermesianax, just as it rendered possible the Delia and the Lycoris of a later time. Under the old régime none of these things could have been. When Antimachus first sat down in his empty house at Colophon to write an elegy to his dead wife, consciously or unconsciously, he was initiating the greatest artistic revolution that the world has ever seen.

The circumstances under which the Lyde was produced were thus in themselves sufficiently unusual to have made a deep impression, and there is reason to believe further that the way in which Antimachus there treated his subject was also strikingly original. Not only was the actual literary form a novel one, and one that subsequently became very popular, but the general tone evidently differed in a marked manner from that of any love-poetry which had gone before. It was, above all things, noticeable for its seriousness, its gravity, and its self-restraint, characteristics entirely foreign to any previous love-poetry addressed to women. Thus Poseidippus expressly contrasts the temperate Antimachus with the licentious Mimnermus.[197] Something similar seems equally implied by the epithet σεμνοτέρη in the epigram of Asclepiades (Anth. Pal. ix. 63, 2). Indirect evidence of the same nature is to be found in the remark of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who refers to Antimachus as an instance τῆς αὐστηρᾶς ἁρμονίας.[198] Lastly, it is not, perhaps, too far-fetched to suppose that in Catullus xcv. the contrast between the Smyrna and the Lyde is not intended to be confined merely to the literary form, but is meant to further imply the poet’s preference for the story of Myrrha over the less highly spiced anecdotes in Antimachus. Very interesting too, from this point of view, are the relations of mutual admiration which are known to have existed between Antimachus and his younger contemporary Plato, an admiration illustrated by several striking anecdotes.[199] That the philosopher’s views on love were directly influenced by the poet cannot, of course, be absolutely proved. At the same time, the well-authenticated story of this intimacy, coupled with all that we know of the Lyde, is very suggestive of this, and might well furnish the subject for more elaborate research on the part of some Platonist. In spite therefore of the very scanty references to the Lyde, and the still scantier remains of the poem itself, it seems to be clear beyond doubt that, both in its circumstances of origin and its style, it was entirely different from any love-poem which had preceded it; and, further, that both circumstances and style may justly be described as romantic. In other words, the Lyde was a romantic love-poem.

But this is not in itself enough to show that the origin of the romantic feeling which appears in Alexandrian literature was due to its influence. It is further necessary to prove that those writers in whose works this feeling first appeals—viz. Asclepiades and Philetas—were actually readers and admirers of Antimachus.

This it is, perhaps, possible to do more conclusively than the general absence of evidence on the whole subject would have led one to expect. It is just Asclepiades and his particular followers who speak with the greatest enthusiasm of Antimachus. Very noteworthy are the words of Asclepiades himself—

And the passage in Poseidippus, where Antimachus and Mimnermus, coupled but contrasted, are spoken of as the first two love-poets, is scarcely less emphatic.[200]

In the case of Philetas, the evidence is also strong. His elegies addressed to Battis are generally admitted to have been modelled, in form, at any rate, on the Lyde of Antimachus; and it does not seem unjustifiable to infer from this that their spirit and their general character were also, in the main, similar. The way in which the two poets are coupled by Ovid (Trist. i. 6, 1) seems to support this view, and, as we have already seen, there is no evidence to the contrary.[201] To sum up, then: the conclusions arrived at are briefly as follows:

(1) In extant Greek poetry there is no trace of romantic love-poetry addressed to women, prior to the time of Asclepiades and Philetas.

(2) In the works of these writers this element suddenly appears, not in the nature of an experiment, but as a leading motive—an almost sure proof that they were not the originators of it.

(3) The Lyde of Antimachus was a work of such a kind, both in nature and in circumstances of production, that there is every reason to believe that it was a romantic love-poem.

(4) Philetas and Asclepiades were notoriously admirers of the Lyde of Antimachus.

(5) Therefore there is reason to believe that the romantic element appearing in their poems was due to the influence of Antimachus, who may thus be regarded as the originator of the romantic element in literature.

Vale, lector benevole, si quidem huc usque mecum perveneris.