But the differences between the treatment of women in the new literature, and that to which they were exposed in the literature we have just been studying, will be most readily made clear if we proceed at once to the detailed examination of the former.
The first and most prominent feature of the New Comedy treatment of the love of men for women is its insistance on marriage—that is to say, on a definite guarantee of permanence and constancy—as the one proper consummation of such love. In fact, as we have already had occasion to observe in another place, the idealisation of marriage is the basis of Greek romance.[268]
This insistance on marriage is, of course, most strikingly exemplified in the typical New Comedy plot, which is sufficiently familiar to every student of the Latin comedians. Thus, in five of these Latin plays, the Heauton Timorumenos (of Menander), the Phormio (of Apollodorus), the Rudens (of Diphilus), the Curculio, and the Poenulus,[269] the story is of exactly the kind that subsequently appears in the Greek novel—a young man falls in love with a virgin, and, after various misfortunes which threaten to separate the pair, they are eventually married, and live happily ever afterwards.
On this class of plot it is unnecessary to dwell, except that it may be worth while just to draw attention to the extremely passionate nature of the love which makes these young men so anxious to marry. The modern reader would instinctively expect that the confinement of love to these legitimate and, as one would now consider them, commonplace channels, would inevitably lead to a lessening of its charm, and a diminution of its force. As a matter of fact, the result was the very reverse. Not only has the character of man’s love for woman changed, but this love has developed an intensity of poetry and passion which has never belonged to it before.[270] Instances are easy to find; the most striking one is perhaps shown us at the meeting of Phaedromus and Planesium, in the Curculio (i. 3):
Pl. tene me, amplectere ergo! Ph. hoc etiam est quamobrem cupiam vivere.
quia te prohibet herus, clam hero potior. Pl. prohibet, nec prohibere quit,
nec prohibebit, nisi mors meum animum abs te abalienaverit.
Ph. sibi sua habeant regna reges, sibi divitias divites,
sibi honores sibi virtutes sibi pugnas sibi proelia!