Κύπριν προβάλλείν κ.τ.λ. (l. 824.)
In the Phoenissae there is not much love lost between Antigone and Haemon (cp. l. 1672 seqq.). In the Orestes the only incident which causes Pylades to take the slightest interest in Electra is her suggestion that they should murder Hermione. (l. 1191 seqq.) In the Helena the first exclamation of Menelaus, when his wife assures him that she has really been faithful to him all the time, is, “How can you prove it?”[118] In the Medea again the absence of the love-element is a distinct loss. No one can doubt that the character of Medea would have gained at once in probability and in pathos, if she had been allowed to recur, if only for a moment, to the memory of her early love for Jason.
If more plays had been preserved, it would, doubtless, have been easy still further to multiply instances; but what has been said already is perhaps enough to show that the romantic element in Euripides is really most conspicuous by its absence. And this cannot be a surprise to anyone who cares to go to the root of the matter. That relation between men and women which we call the “romantic” is founded upon sentiments and ideas which are entirely distinct from the sexual emotions. Euripides, as we have had occasion to notice again and again, though he had carefully studied the sexual instinct in all its workings, had never been able to conceive of a relation between man and woman which had not this for its basis.[119] Without pure—I had almost said Platonic—love for its fundamental principle, romance is an impossibility. The romantic Alexandrian writers may not have themselves loved purely, but they knew what pure love was, and such love was their ideal. With Euripides it was not so, and this one fact is enough to show that he belongs to the old literature and not to the new. That Euripides, by the emphasis which he laid on the female character, contributed largely towards preparing men’s minds for the growth of romance and what we now call love, cannot be denied; but that he himself had more than the very faintest glimmerings of what such love really was, cannot be maintained by anyone who has ever read his works.
And here we may close this first part of our enquiry. The foregoing examination of the Greek writers, though it has made no mention of various well-known names, has yet been for our present purpose a practically complete one. Pindar was prevented by the nature of his works from dealing to any large extent with the position of women or their relations with men;[120] and even where he has an opportunity of so doing (as, e.g., Fr. 122), the result is very disappointing, especially in view of his Boeotian origin. The fragments of the early tragedians, other than the three discussed, are strangely deficient in references to women. Nor need the old Attic Comedy detain us. The general spirit of this thoroughly Athenian product is sufficiently summed up in what profess to be the earliest words of it extant, the fragment of Susario,
ἀκούετε λεῴ· Σουσαρίων λέγει τάδε,
υἱὸς Φιλίνον Μεγαρόθεν Τριποδίσκιος·
κακὸν γυναίκες,
while it may be doubted whether in the whole course of this literature a female character was ever introduced on the stage, except with the view of leading up to some form of indecency.[121]
The net results of this examination, though chiefly negative, are yet fairly clear. It has, I hope, been shown that—
(1) That relation between men and women which is now called “love” was, as far as can be gathered from literature, non-existent among the Greeks down to the end of the fifth century.