FOOTNOTES:
[38] ὁ δε κατ' αυτην την φυσιν του πραγματος ὁρος, αει μεν ὁ μειζων μεχρι του συνδηλος ειναι καλλιων εστι κατα το μεγεθος. ὡς δε ἁπλως διορισαντας ειπειν, εν ὁσω μεγεθει κατα το εικος η το αναγκαιον εφεξης γιγνομενων συμβαινει εις ευτυχιαν εκ δυστυχιας, η εξ ευτυχιας εις δυστυχιαν μεταβαλλειν, ἱκανος ὁρος εστιν του μεγεθους. (Poet., vii. 7.)
WOMEN IN GREEK POETRY [39]
[39] Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry. By E. F. M. Benecke.
The editor of this book cannot be congratulated either on his competence or on his discretion. To hurry into the world a work which is not merely a fragment, but which cries for revision, suppression, and correction in almost every page, is a literary crime of the first magnitude, and deserves the severest castigation. Of the author of the work, who appears to have been a young man of some attainments and of much promise, we desire to speak with all gentleness; we wholly absolve him from blame, for we have no right to assume that he would himself have given to the world what his editor admits was intra penetralia Vestæ, and what we hope and believe he would himself have committed emendaturis ignibus, had he arrived at years of discretion. But the dissemination of error is no light thing, especially in relation to subjects which are of great interest, and, from an historical and literary point of view, of great importance. When we think of the many amiable and industrious tutors at Oxford and Cambridge who, unless they are put on their guard, will unsuspiciously fill their note-books with the nonsense of this volume, and impart it, by degrees, to the listening credulity of youth, we feel we have no alternative but to perform a plain, if painful, duty. We repeat, we absolve the author from all blame; the sole culprit is the editor.
That Solomon was the author of the Iliad, Poggio the author of the Annals of Tacitus, and Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays, are hypotheses scarcely less monstrously absurd than the thesis propounded in this volume. Mr. Benecke's main contentions are "that a pure love between man and woman seemed to the early Greeks" (that is, to those who lived before the latter end of the Peloponnesian War) a sheer impossibility; that "in extant Greek poetry there is no trace of romantic love poetry addressed to women prior to the time of Asclepiades and Philetas"; that "in the works of these writers this element suddenly appears not in the nature of an experiment but as a leading motive"; that the appearance of this element was due to the influence of Antimachus, "who was the first man who had the courage to say that a woman was worth loving, and who may thus be regarded as the originator of the romantic element in literature." As we have not space to refute this nonsense in detail, we will give some examples of the way in which it is supported. First come misrepresentations and blunders. To emphasize the degradation of women, passages in translation are twisted and perverted almost beyond recognition.
Thus the couplet of Catullus—
"Tunc te dilexi, non tantum ut vulgus amicam,
Sed pater ut natos diligit et generos"—
is actually paraphrased "I loved you, not as a man loves a woman, but as a man loves a youth." The couplet in which Antigone says, "If my husband died, I could get another, and were I deprived of him too, I could be a mother by another man"—
ποσις μεν αν μοι, κατθανοντος, αλλος ην
και παις απ' αλλου φωτος, ει τουδ' ημπλακον—
is translated "If my husband had died, I could have married another, if he had failed to get me children, I could have committed adultery." The "main motive of the Iliad," we are informed, (p. 76), "is the love of Achilles for Patroclus." The interest of the Ajax "is meant to centre on Teucer, the amasius of the dead Ajax." That the Alcestis may not be pressed into the service of those who would maintain that the Greeks knew how to respect women, the key to it is to be found "in the relation existing between Admetus and Apollo"(!) The revolting coarseness and flippant vulgarity which mark the book, and, which do very little credit to Oxford training, are illustrated by the remarks employed to disparage these types of womanhood which the writer well knows would refute his theory. Thus of Nausicaa, "she is always regarded as a charming type of woman; but, after all, how one naturally thinks of her is (sic) as a charming type of washerwoman"; of Penelope, "she longs for the return of her husband, no doubt; but what really grieves her about the suitors is not their suggestions as to his death, but the quantity of pork they eat." On a par with this sort of thing is the remark about a play of Sophocles, which, by the way, is not extant, that "it merely drew the usual picture of the gods playing shove-halfpenny with human souls" (p. 47); or flippant vulgarity like the following—Admetus expresses "his deep regret that he cannot accompany Alcestis, as Charon does not issue return tickets." If this is the humour of young Oxford, the progress of which we hear so much has been purchased at a heavy price.
But to continue. On page 27 we are confronted with the astounding statement that "it is in Anacreon that we find for the first time love-poetry addressed to a woman." Why, Hermesianax (15, 16) distinctly states that Musæus wrote love-poetry to his wife or mistress, Antiope, and that Hesiod wrote many poems in honour of his love, Eoia (Id. 22-24). Alcæus notoriously wrote love-poems to Sappho, as we need go no further than the first book of Aristotle's Rhetoric to know; both Alcman, the lover of Egido and Megalostrate, and, probably Ibycus also wrote love-poetry to women. It is mere special pleading to contend that Mimnermus did not write poetry to the mistress of his affections, to whom, according to Strabo, his erotic poetry was addressed. Hermesianax distinctly states that Mimnermus was passionately in love with Nanno, and certainly implies that his love-poetry was addressed to her (35-38). It is true that two of the fragments of Archilochus are ambiguous, but one is not; and, if we may judge by a single line (Fr. 71), his love for Neobule expressed itself in a manner indistinguishable from Petrarch's vein—"Would that I might touch Neobule's hand": ει γαρ ὡς εμοι γενοιτο χειρα Νεοβουλης θιγειν. It is clear that women had a prominent place in the poetry of Stesichorus, and in his poem entitled Calyce we seem to have had an anticipation of the modern love romance. And yet, in spite of all this, we are informed that the Greeks had no love-poetry addressed to, or concerning women, before Anacreon.
The methods adopted for minimizing or disguising the importance of women in the Iliad and Odyssey are very amusing. "The Trojan war was the work of a woman; but how very little that woman appears in the Iliad." She appears quite as frequently and imposingly as the action admits, and she and Andromache are painted as elaborately as any of the dramatis personæ in the poem. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that, with the exception of Achilles and Agamemnon, they leave the deepest impression on us. "A woman has been managing the affairs of Odysseus for twenty years in an exemplary fashion; but the hero of the Odyssey on his return prefers to associate with the swineherd." Comment is superfluous. Nothing could be more striking than the prominence which is given to women both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey. To cite such writers as Simonides of Amorgus, Phocylides and Theognis, as authorities on the position of women, is as absurd, in Sancho Panza's phrase, as to look for pears on an elm.
The Greek Tragedies are treated after the same fashion as the Iliad and the Odyssey. We are told that the remarkable prominence given in Sophocles's plays to the affection between brother and sister affords conclusive proof that the nature of modern love between man and woman was unknown to him; and we are also informed, that the relations between Electra and Orestes, and Antigone and Polynices "are absolutely those of modern lovers." It would be difficult to say which is more absurd, the deduction or the statement. What love could be more loyal and more passionate than Hæmon's love for Antigone? The prominence given by Sophocles to the love between brother and sister has its origin from the same cause as the very small part played by lovers in the Greek tragedies generally. In the first place, a poet who took his plot from the fortunes of the houses of Pelops or Laius could only work within the limits of tradition; in the second place, love romances, unless involving deep tragical issues as in the Trachiniæ, the Medea, and the Hippolytus, were totally incompatible with the Greek idea of tragedy. But we must hurry to the grand discovery made by the author of this volume.
Somewhere about 405 B.C. flourished Antimachus, of Colophon, the author of a voluminous epic, and of several other poems. He had the misfortune to lose his wife Lyde, and, to beguile his sorrow, he composed a long elegy in her honour. Of the far-reaching consequences of this act let our author speak. "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." Asclepiades and Philetas followed him as imitators, and the thing was done. Woman was at last "connected with 'romance.'" Our author admits the difficulty of supposing that "any one man could invent and popularize an entirely new emotion"; but suggests that if we regard it as "simply due to the readjustment of an already existing emotion," that is παιδεραστια, such a supposition is "no longer absurd." It is not only absurd but monstrous.
The truth almost certainly is, that the love between man and woman in ancient Greece differed very little from the love between man and woman as it exists now. Marriage was, it is true, purely a matter of business; most wives aspired to nothing more than the management of the nursery and the household, and most women being without education, and living in seclusion, could scarcely associate, intellectually at least, on equal terms with their husbands or lovers. But this proves nothing more than mariages de convenance, and love based on the fascination exercised by sensuous attraction prove now. Then, as in our own time, there were marriages and marriages, liaisons and liaisons. The story which Plutarch tells of Callias (Cimon. iv.) shows that marriage was often based on love. The pictures given of Hector and Andromache in the Iliad, of Alcinous and Arete, of Ulysses and Penelope, of Menelaus and Helen in the Odyssey, the charming account of Ischomachus and his young wife in the Œconomics of Xenophon, the noble and pathetic story of Pantheia and Abradatas in the Cyropædeia, the story which, in his life of Agis,[40] Plutarch tells of Chilonis, and, in the Morals, of Camma,[41] and innumerable other legends, traditions, and anecdotes, prove that women could inspire and return as pure and as chivalrous a love as any of the heroines of chivalry. The poet who could write about marriage as Homer does in the Sixth Odyssey would have had little to learn from modern refinement.[42] The love which Critobulus describes himself as having for Amandra, in the Symposium of Xenophon, and the remarks made by Socrates in that dialogue embody the most exalted conceptions of the passion of love between the sexes. The sentiments of Plutarch on this subject are indistinguishable from the most refined notions of the modern world, as is abundantly illustrated in the Amatorius, the Conjugalia Præcepta, and in the remarks on marriage in the eighth chapter of the Essay on Moral Virtue. If Ajax and Hercules became brutes, Tecmessa and Deianeira were not the only women who have discovered that men are, too often, May when they woo, and December when they wed. It is ridiculous to suppose that a people whose popular poetry could present such types of womanhood as Arete, Antigone, Alcestis, Deianeira, Electra, Macaria, Iphigenia, Evadne, and Polyxena, who could boast such poetesses as Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Myrtis, and Damophila, and whose society was graced by such women as Aspasia, Diotima, Gnathæna, Herpyllis, Metaneira, and Leontium, should have given expression to passion, sentiment, and romance only in παιδικοι ὑμνοι.
What the author of this book, and what others who are fond of generalizing about the Greeks, forget, is, that of a once vast and voluminous literature we have only fragments. That portion of their poetry which would have thrown light on the subject here discussed has perished. It is certain, for example, that of their lyric poetry a very large portion was erotic, of that portion exactly one poem has survived in its entirety, while a few hundred scattered lines, torn from their context, represent the rest that has come down to us. We know, again, that in some hundreds of their dramas, in the Middle and New Comedy that is to say, the plots turned on love—of these dramas not a single one is preserved. But the reflection of some twenty of them in Terence and Plautus, and several scattered fragments, clearly indicate, that the passion between the sexes involved as much sentiment and romance as it does in our Elizabethan dramatists. In what respect do Charinus and Pamphilus in the Andria and Antipho in the Phormio—mere replicas, of course, of Greek originals—differ from modern lovers? What could be more romantic than the love story which formed the plot of the Phasma of Menander? It is fair to our author to say that he fully admits this, in the only tolerably satisfactory part of his book, the chapter on Women in Greek Comedy. The great blot on Greek life, to which Mr. Benecke gives so much prominence, has probably had far too much importance attached to it, partly, perhaps, owing to its accentuation in the writings of Plato, and partly owing to that rage for scandalous tittle-tattle, so unhappily characteristic of ancient anecdote-mongers from Ion to Athenæus.