Primitive Love and Love-Stories

by Henry T. Finck

Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the Spartan, the result was the same—the frustration of pure love. The girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III., 337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of Terence (i.e. Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."

LITERATURE AND LIFE

Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual relations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal love which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book, too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highly educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their family, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302) that men of genius may in this respect be in the same boat as ordinary mortals. In view of these considerations, and of the rarity of true love even in modern Europe and America, it surely is not unnatural or reckless to assume that there may have been whole nations in this predicament, though they were as advanced in many other respects as were the Greeks and as capable of other forms of domestic attachment. Yet, as I remarked on page 6, several writers, including so eminent a thinker as Professor William James, have held that the Greeks could have differed from us only in their ideas about love, and not in their feelings themselves. "It is incredible," he remarks in the review referred to,

"that individual women should not at all times have had the power to fill individual manly breasts with enchanted respect…. So powerful and instinctive, an emotion can never have been recently evolved. But our ideas about our emotions, and the esteem in which we hold them, differ very much from one generation to another."

In the next paragraph he admits, however, that "no doubt the way in which we think about our emotions reacts on the emotions themselves, dampening or inflaming them, as the case may be;" and in this admission he really concedes the whole matter. The main object of my chapter "How Sentiments Change and Grow" is to show how men's ideas regarding nature, religion, murder, polygamy, modesty, chastity, incest, affect and modify their feelings in relation to them, thus furnishing indirectly a complete answer to the objection made to my theory.[313]

Now the ideas which the Greeks had about their women could not but dampen any elevated feelings of love that might otherwise have sprung up in them. Their literature attests that they considered love a degrading, sensual passion, not an ennobling, supersensual sentiment, as we do. With such an idea how could they have possibly felt toward women as we do? With the idea firmly implanted in their minds that women are in every respect the inferiors of men, how could they have experienced that emotional state of ecstatic adoration and worship of the beloved which is the very essence of romantic love? Of necessity, purity and adoration were thus entirely eliminated from such love as they were capable of feeling toward women. Nor can they, though noted for their enthusiasm for beautiful human forms, have risen above sensualism in the admiration of the personal beauty of women; for since their girls were left to grow up in utter ignorance, neither their faces nor their minds can have been of the kind which inspires supersensual love. With boys it was different. They were educated mentally as well as physically, and hence as Winckelmann—himself a Greek in this respect—has remarked, "the supreme beauty of Greek art is male rather than female." If the healthy Greek mind could be so utterly different from the healthy modern mind in regard to the love of boys, why not in regard to the love of women? The perverseness of the Greeks in this respect was so great that, as we have seen, they not only adored boys while despising women, but preferred masculine women to feminine women.

But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas, as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteria are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied with sympathy and affection. That there was no gallantry and self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188, 197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from the heartless way in which the men treated the women—in life I mean, not merely in literature—refusing to allow them the least liberty of movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their own account. As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot exist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy, and no willingness to sacrifice one's selfish comfort or pleasures for another.

Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek literature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in the world if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, and Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while on the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients of love which also accompany lust. If literature has any historic value at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings of sensual love—including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and despair—-were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299). I say the Greeks of Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose capacities for love we still have to consider.

GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA

It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among the champions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimental and "modern." Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold of literature. Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a host with Euripides. Menander is the starting-point to others, while Benecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventing modern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon. The majority hesitate to go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth century before Christ, while some modestly content themselves with the romancers of the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ—thus allowing a latitude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.