[317] I have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing. A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians. The Andromeda of Euripides, he declares (23), "became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure assumption on his part, not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved. Benecke has devoted a special "Excursus" to this play (203-205), in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature "need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides's day is the conception of the 'galante Ritter' setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. "Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry. The contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his History of Greek Literature, remarks with comic naïveté: "The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice? Was not Alcestis written to enforce that principle of conduct? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modern ideas of chivalrous love?
Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had passed away, was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is "the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife—a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon—and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.
[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:
[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].
[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by preference incestuous passions, "and it appears that such passions were not rare in actual life too in those times."
[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., Asin., III., 3, particularly v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that "a very sentimental character is Charinus in the Mercator;" and he also points to Ter., Eun., 193 ff.
[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of sentimentality—altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery—there is enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of life. But when, in the third act of the Asinaria, the lover says to his girl, "If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours," we promptly ask, "Would he have done it?" And the answer, from all we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus: "Now you promise me everything, but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a procuress. From the point of view of purity the Captivi is particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue Plautus himself—who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin—makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which "there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira—which are the staple features of these later Greek plays.
[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too much offend modern taste.
[323] Couat, 142. There are reasons to believe that the epistles referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaenetus lived about the fifth century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost after surviving eight centuries.
[324] See also Helbig's Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of Greek art.