This is, however, an isolated expression, for Menand. Incert. 36, at first sight similar, is really different.
But, though the writers of the New Comedy are careful, as a general rule, to avoid anything that might have seemed too severe a stricture on that system of Hetaera-worship which was so distinctive a feature of the age, they are unmistakably emphatic in their assertion that such sensual love is not the only kind of love of which a man is capable. The chivalrous manner in which the lover of New Comedy often behaves to his lady, is one of the clearest features of the change which the authors of the romantic school had succeeded in bringing about on the Athenian stage.
At once the most striking and the most perplexing illustration of this is furnished by the character of Thrasonides in Menander’s celebrated play, the Misumenus. This Thrasonides, who belongs to the regular type of the Miles Gloriosus, is in love with a slave-girl, whom he has obtained in the course of his wars;[301] but he has so disgusted her with his boasting (like Leontichus in Lucian) that she has conceived a most violent hatred for him. He then, though she is his slave, and though his passion is so great that he cannot sleep for thinking of her,[302] instead of using his undoubted power to accomplish what he wishes,[303] tries every means that he can imagine in order to conciliate her, “sending her gifts, and weeping, and praying,”[304] that she may look more favourably upon him.
The dénouement of the play is lost. It is not impossible that in the end the slave-girl was identified as an Athenian, and carried off by some more acceptable lover, who thus profited by the chivalrous conduct of his rival, or she may even have turned out to be the soldier’s sister, as in the Curculio or the Epidicus, in either of which cases the scruples of Thrasonides would be necessary to the working of the plot. But all this is, for our present purpose, of no importance. What is of importance, and of the utmost importance, is the fact that Thrasonides, though he is so violently in love with the girl, will not make use of his unquestioned power to gratify this passion, because of the dislike which she feels for him. In fact, his love is of such a kind that he does not merely want to satisfy a sensual appetite—he wants to be loved. Unless he can feel that she loves him, none of those privileges, which, to the ordinary Hetaera-lover of the day, would have been of themselves the complete consummation of love, are of any value to him. ἔξεστί μοι τοῦτο καὶ βούλομαι, οὐ ποιῶ δέ.
The aim of the lover is not to gratify himself, but to inspire love.[305] That we are here face to face with a form of love which is not only actually absent from Middle Comedy, but is by nature absolutely foreign to that literature and could not possibly appear in it, is too obvious to need further emphasis.[306]
This much, then, is clear; but there remains a most perplexing question, which, though it is a little aside of our immediate subject, is yet too interesting to be passed by altogether. Why is it Thrasonides, the Miles Gloriosus whom all the Comedians are banded together to ridicule, who appears as the most chivalrous lover of the whole of New Comedy?[307] Why is a man who is universally regarded as a fool, made to give expression to such elevated sentiments, and to follow such a noble line of conduct? The first explanation that suggests itself is, of course, “Because he is a fool.” This view is certainly advanced in a passage of Plutarch, where Thrasonides is compared to the miser who starves rather than make use of the food he has in the house,[308] and seems to find favour too with Thrasonides’ own slave.[309] But this explanation is not a very satisfactory one, somehow. However great a fool Menander might wish to make of the mercenary soldier of the time, this does not seem the natural line for his folly to take, nor was it the line, as we know from historical evidence, that the folly of these people actually did as a rule take. A Pyrgopolinices must, one would have thought, have been a far more familiar figure to citizens who had enjoyed a Macedonian occupation, than a Thrasonides. One might, perhaps, imagine that the behaviour of Alexander to the wife and daughters of Darius—behaviour which was regarded in Greece as somewhat remarkable[310]—had suggested the character of Thrasonides, for, after all, the ideal soldier of the age, whether for good or evil, is always Alexander; only it seems doubtful whether a single action of an unusual kind could serve to form so constant a type as the chivalrous soldier-lover. At one time I thought that, as the soldier of New Comedy has generally served in Asia, perhaps he might be supposed to have imported his advanced romantic ideas from one of those Greek Asiatic cities which were, as we know, the original home of Greek romance, and indeed of all important developments of Greek erotic literature.[311] But there is to modern notions so great an incongruity in the idea of, say, the Colonel of a West India regiment so influenced by the latest school of literature as to model his life on it, that, though such a character would not, perhaps, have seemed so absurd to the Greeks as it does to us, still, in the absence of all definite evidence, I have preferred not to lay undue stress upon what is, after all, entirely a matter of conjecture. Indeed, the question remains to me a very obscure one, and I cannot at present see any satisfactory solution of it.
But, whatever may have been the causes which led to the creation of this particular character, the soldier-lover of a more or less Thrasonides type is an unquestionable feature of New Comedy. Besides the hero of the Misumenus, of whom we have spoken, in the Sicyonius (also by Menander) we find another soldier, Stratophanes, who buys a slave-girl, and then treats her as if she were a free woman.[312] To the same class of feeling, though expressed in a somewhat different way, belongs the remorse which the soldier Polemon (in the Periceiromene of Menander) feels for the wrong he has done to his αἰχμαλώτῳ ἐρωμένῃ.
A case in some respects similar, though in others different, is that of the soldier Stratippocles, in the Epidicus, who falls in love with his captive, but does not touch her.[313] The differences, of course, here are that, firstly, the play belongs to Middle Comedy, its moral being that Stratippocles will be happier with his fidicina than with the girl of high birth, for whom he has formed the chivalrous attachment;[314] while, secondly, the continence of the hero is not so much a feature of his character as a necessity for the development of the plot; and, thirdly, the soldier is here not a mercenary, but an Athenian citizen, who has been fighting against the Thebans. But though, therefore, the case of the Epidicus does not belong to the same category as those previously discussed, the association in it of the soldier with chivalrous behaviour towards women is yet worthy of notice, and, even if only a coincidence, is still an interesting one.[315]
Apart, too, from these very remarkable instances, there are not a few passages scattered about in the remains of the New Comedy which serve to show that the “love,” of which there is so much talk in that literature, is not the merely animal passion of an earlier period. Of these, a striking one is that preserved in Plutarch, ap. Stob. Flor. lxiii. 34:
τῶν Μενάνδρου δραμάτων, says Plutarch there, οὐκ ἴσως ἁπάντων ἓν συνεκτικόν ἐστιν ὁ ἔρως, οἷον πνεῦμα κοινὸν διακεχυκώς; ὃν οὖν μάλιστα θιασώτην τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ὀργιαστὴν ἴσμεν, τὸν ἄνδρα συνεπιλαμβάνωμεν εἰς τὴν ζήτησιν, ἐπεὶ καὶ λελάκηκε περὶ τοῦ πάθους φιλοσοφώτερον. ἄξιον γὰρ εἶναι θαύματος φήσας τὸ περὶ τοὺς ἐρῶντας, ὥσπερ ἐστὶν ἅμα λαλεῖ. εἶτα ἀπορεῖ καὶ ζητεῖ πρὸς ἑαυτόν·