POETS AND HETAIRAI.
The one commendable feature which the stories of Acontius and Cydippe and of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each case is a respectable and pure maiden (see Argon., IV., 1018-1025). But, although the later romance writers followed this example, it would be a great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch of virgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be "the necessary starting-point of the love-romance in a refined society." Alexandrian society was anything but refined in matters of love, and the trait referred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in a literature devoted chiefly to the hetairai. We see this especially also in the epigrams of the period. It is astonishing, writes Couat (173), how many of these are erotic; and "almost all," he adds, "are addressed to courtesans or young boys." "Dans toutes l'auteur ne chante que la beauté plastique et les plaisirs faciles; leur Cypris est la Cypris [Greek: pandaemos], celle qui se vend à tout le monde." In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Poseidippus and others, he finds sentimentality but no sentiment; and on page 62 he sums up Alexandria with French patness as a place "ou l'on faisait assidûment des vers sur l'amour sans être amoureux"—"where they were ever writing love-poems without ever being in love." But what repels modern taste still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration is the effeminate degradation of the masculine type most admired. Helbig, who, in his book on Campanische Wandmalerei, enforces the testimony of literature with the inferences that can be drawn from mural paintings and vases, remarks (258) that the favorite poetic ideals of the time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks and long, soft tresses. Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thus even Achilles by the bucolic poets. In later representations indicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphemus no longer as a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardless youth.[324]
That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the advent of purity and refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the hetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they were the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men, and to some of them great honors were paid. In the time of Polybius the most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls; portrait statues of such were placed in temples and other public places, by the side of those of generals and statesmen, and there were few prominent men whose names were not associated with these creatures.
The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these [Greek: hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength of this information I assumed, in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the uneducated domestic women. A study of the original sources has now convinced me that this was a mistake. Aspasia no doubt was a remarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself, Theodota is visited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again, and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira. Athenaeus informs us that some of these women
"had a great opinion of themselves, paying attention to education and spending a part of their time on literature; so that they were very ready with their rejoinders and replies;"
but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consist chiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms. Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, who was famed for her repartee:
"Once, when a man came to see her and saw some eggs on a dish, and said, 'Are these raw, Gnathaena, or boiled?' she replied, 'They are made of brass, my boy.'" "On one occasion, when some poor lovers of the daughter of Gnathaena came to feast at her house, and threatened to throw it down, saying that they had brought spades and mattocks on purpose; 'But,' said Gnathaena, 'if you had these implements, you should have pawned them and brought some money with you.'"
The pictures of the utter degradation of the most famous of the hetairai—Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by Athenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages. Combined with the revelations made in Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi], they demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of the men, even if the latter had been capable of it.
It is to such vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece and Alexandria addressed their verses. And herein they were followed by those of the Latins who may be regarded as imitators of the Alexandrians—Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principal erotic poets of Rome. They wrote all their love-poems to, for, or about, a class of women corresponding to the Greek hetairai. Of Ovid I have already spoken (189), and what I said of him practically applies to the others. Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in his mind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who is forever writing love-poems without ever being really in love. With Catullus the sensual passion at least is sincere. Yet even Professor Sellar, who declares that he is, "with the exception perhaps of Sappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love," is obliged to admit that he "has not the romance and purity of modern sentiment" (349, 22). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. "There was a time," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, "when I loved you not as a man loves his mistress, but as a father loves his son or his son-in-law"!
Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,
Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem.
Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.