(Anth. Pal. xii. 68.)
δάκρυα σοὶ καὶ νέρθε διὰ χθονός, Ἡλιοδώρα,
δωροῦμαι.
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]