(2) The position occupied by women in the consideration of men was so unimportant, that even the sensual relation of the sexes was but little treated of in literature till a comparatively late period, and was always, down to the end of the fifth century, looked upon by a considerable section of society as unfitted for public discussion and representation. In other words, love-poetry in the modern sense is non-existent in classical Greek literature; while love-poetry in any sense, addressed to women, is a far more insignificant element in that literature than is commonly supposed.
That what has just been said does not hold good of the “Alexandrian” poets is so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated. Equally true, however, and not equally obvious, is the fact that, from the very first, these writers talk of women and women’s love in an entirely different tone to that adopted by those of whom we have hitherto been speaking. The line of cleavage between, say, Asclepiades and Euripides, is in reality quite as marked as that between Euripides and Apollonius. On this subject, therefore, it is perhaps worth while to say a few words, though the terribly mutilated condition in which the works of the earlier Alexandrians especially have come down to us, makes it very difficult to point to striking examples of what has been said.
The first representatives of the “Alexandrian” school of poets—that is, of the school of women-lovers—are Asclepiades and Philetas;[122] and in both cases the mere nature of their works (quite apart from their tone) is sufficiently striking when compared with the literature that had gone before.
Whether Philetas actually gave the title of Battis to a collection of his poems is difficult to say—it is, perhaps, on the whole, not improbable that he did—but in any case there can be no doubt that a considerable number of his elegies were either actually addressed to Battis, or else treated of her. The erudite and elaborate style of these poems is equally indisputable. Now, whatever may have been the actual tone of address in these elegies—the fragments unfortunately tell us nothing, and such other evidence as there is on the subject is of the scantiest description[123]—the two facts above-mentioned form of themselves a combination quite without parallel in the Greek literature of which we have hitherto been speaking. That anyone should have taken the trouble to devote erudition and elaboration to the praise of a woman, would have been an unheard-of thing in early Greece.
Asclepiades is an equally striking figure in the early Alexandrian literature; for it was he who was the first to introduce woman-love into the epigram—the first, in fact, to give it that social recognition which we have seen already accorded to boy-love, well-nigh two centuries before.[124]
But what renders Asclepiades particularly important for us just now—far more so than Philetas—is the fact that some forty of his epigrams have been preserved, and that it will therefore be possible, by examining these, to study at close quarters the points in which the tone of this new love-poetry differs from that of the old.
In the epigrams of Asclepiades we find, for the first time, love for a woman spoken of as a matter of life and death:—
οἴχομ’, ἔρωτες, ὄλωλα, διοίχομαι· είς γὰρ ἑταίραν
νυστάζων ἐπέβην, ἠδ’ ἔθιγόν τ’ Ἀΐδα.[125]
Anth. Pal. v. 162, 3-4.