An examination of other Greek myths and legends that have any claim to antiquity will furnish a very similar result. Whether in those myths of gods and heroes which found their way into literature from its beginning, or in those local legends which, though first appearing in the Alexandrian writers, are evidently in reality much older, wherever the antiquity of the story can be proved, two characteristics are very noticeable. The first is the importance of women as the originators of the action; the second is the absence of the romantic element. The capabilities of women are thoroughly recognised, though the tendency of the time is to describe their influence as for evil rather than as for good; their importance is everywhere admitted: but that a man should be really or seriously in love with a woman is a thing unknown.
This is certainly at first sight a strange anomaly, and yet it is, perhaps, capable of explanation. The developer of the myth could not fail to be confronted by a great contradiction—the traditional importance of women and their actual condition of repression. He saw in the stories the women, like Medea or Ariadne, profoundly influencing the career of their lovers, while the men, like Jason or Theseus, stood helplessly and more or less apathetically on one side. The converse of such positions he naturally did not find. His surroundings forbade his drawing the true deduction, that the stories were intended to illustrate the helplessness of men without a woman to direct them; he drew therefore the contrary deduction, that the dignity and superiority of man prevented him from taking an active interest in any matter where a woman was concerned. From this deduction, combined with all that was known of the emotional and passionate character of feminine nature, there followed that view of the relation between man and woman which is so noticeable in all the myths and legends as we find them in literature. A woman may be desperately in love with a man, but the converse is impossible.[6] Love may lead women to humiliation, to treachery, to crime, and to suicide, but never, except under the most extraordinary circumstances, men.[7]
The most cursory examination of the ordinary and most familiar Greek legends will sufficiently illustrate this.
Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα. Of the many amours of Zeus, the only one of at all a permanent character, the only one which he thought it worth his while to legalise, was that for Ganymede.[8] His treatment of Minos, again, was very different from that which any of his female friends received.[9]
The goddesses suffer for their indiscretions, never the gods. Aphrodite’s pathetic confession to Anchises,[10] or her agony for Adonis, the helpless devotion of Luna to Endymion, or of Aurora to Tithonus, can find no parallels among the stories of the gods. Love may drive Apollo to tend cattle, but it is love for Admetus.
In the lower stratum of humanity, the treachery of Medea or Ariadne, the story of Scylla[11] with its dozen variants, the guilt of Stheneboea, of Myrrha, of Pasiphae, the deaths of Byblis or Phyllis,[12] are but a few of the more obvious examples.
The idea that a man could be subject to such passions is not to be found till much later in the history of the legends. The original version of the story makes Eriphanis follow Menalcas through the forest and die for his disdain;[13] that Menalcas should afterwards die of love for Euhippe is an addition by Hermesianax.[14] In the old legend, Daphnis is the companion of Artemis, and the nymph who loves him seeks him in vain by every fountain and by every grove;[15] it is Sositheus who tells of his search for his lost Pimplea,[16] and Alexander Aetolus, or whoever Tityrus may be, who sets him wandering over the mountains after Xenea.[17]
A good commentary on all this is furnished by the stories selected, apparently more or less at random, by Parthenius in his Περὶ Ἐρωτικῶν Παθημάτων, and an examination of this work (dedicated to the Roman Cornelius Gallus) may serve to show how tenaciously the original idea of the relative positions of men and women retained its hold even among the “romantic” Alexandrians.
The stories narrated by Parthenius number 36 in all.
In three cases, those of Leucophrye (5), Peisidice (21), and Nanis (22), love induces women to betray their country to the enemy; in each case the suggestion of treachery is made by them. In one case a man, Diognetus (9), is guilty of similar treachery, but here he is trapped into it by an oath to his lady to do whatever she asks him—an oath which he swears without thinking what it may imply; and, besides, he betrays, not his own countrymen, but merely his allies.