“If you do so,” he continues—
“ἀγαθὸς μὲν ἀκούσεαι
ἐξ ἀστῶν,
and Love will deal kindly with you, and save you from such pangs as I have suffered (21-24). For we grow older every day, and youth is the season for forming those friendships which last a lifetime (25-34). Now, I would readily do anything for your sake, but if you disregard my words, the time may come when even if you call me I will not answer” (35-40).
But anyone who has ever read this charming little poem will not need to have its character further forced upon him. The manliness, the dignity, the courtesy of it, are patent in every line; more striking still to those who know Greek literature is the spirit of self-negation which pervades the whole; and all this, combined with a passion which is none the less real because it is kept rigorously under control. Even in Alexandrian times it would be hard to find a poem addressed to a woman which can equal this in its chivalrous tone; to look for such a poem in early Greek literature would be vain indeed.
In the second of these two pieces (Idyll xxx.), also in all probability modelled on Alcaeus, the purely erotic side of the matter comes more to the front than in the one we have just been discussing, but here, too, one cannot fail to be struck by the quiet earnestness of the tone, which is as far removed from the good-humoured banter of Asclepiades as it is from the outspoken brutality of Archilochus.
But perhaps the most striking commentary on this state of feeling is that furnished by the other section of the Lesbian school of poets. It has troubled the minds of many modern commentators to think why Sappho should have addressed love-poems to Anactoria; for those who have formed a true idea of what “love” between a man and a woman meant in Greece of the seventh century, and compared this with the love then existing among men for one another, the question answers itself. Sappho, in addressing love-poems to Anactoria, was but adapting to her own circumstances and sex the universal contemporary principles of love-poetry. It seemed so unnatural then, and so impossible, to connect the sexual instinct with any pure or noble feeling, that Sappho, because her love was pure and its ideal a noble one, instinctively and inevitably chose as the object of this love her fellow-women, just as the men of her time chose their fellow-men.[156] To the Greek of the period the association of the sexes inevitably suggested sensuality; Sappho loved Anactoria, just as Alcaeus loved Lycus, in order that this suggestion might be as far as possible excluded. Sappho loved a woman because her love was too pure to allow her to love a man. All this sounds strange—monstrous almost—to modern ears; and yet, of all the scandal of the centuries which has heaped itself up around the name of Lesbos, what Sappho herself would have resented most would perhaps have been the story that she was in love with Phaon.
We have already had occasion to notice that Anacreon, while he was the originator of love-poetry addressed to women, at the same time addressed a large number of his poems, in fact, the majority, to boys. In his case, therefore, it is possible for the first time to compare the two forms of “love” in the same individual. The comparison is not much to the advantage of the newer feeling. While the outspoken sensuality of the poems devoted to women cannot be matter of dispute, even judging from such fragments of them as remain, the chaste and sober nature of Anacreon’s relation to his boy-lovers is not only a feature of the extant fragments, but is also alluded to more than once by ancient writers, who had his complete works from which to draw their inferences. Thus Aelian (Var. Hist. ix. 4), speaking of the love of Anacreon for Smerdias (cp. Anacreon, Fr. 48) says—
εἶτα ἥσθη τὸ μειράκιον τῷ ἐπαίνῳ καὶ τὸν Ἀνακρέοντα ἠσπάζετο σεμνῶς εὖ μάλα, ἐρῶντα τῆς ψυχῆς, ἀλλ’ οὐ τοῦ σώματος. μὴ γάρ τις ἡμῖν διαβαλλέτω, πρὸς θεῶν, τὸν ποιητὴν τὸν Τήϊον, μηδ’ ἀκόλαστον εἶναι λεγέτω.