In the apprehension of several modern writers, love among the Greeks, was not merely based upon physical elements, as it must everywhere be, but included little or nothing else.[[1193]] It had there, they suppose, none of these romantic features, nothing of that heroic self-devotion or lofty intercommunion of soul with soul, which among northern nations, more particularly in fiction, characterises this powerful and mysterious principle, which binds together in indissoluble union individuals of different sexes, and renders throughout life the contentment and happiness of the one, dependent on the well-being of the other.
But I can discover in the Greeks nothing which, on this point, can distinguish them from other civilised races, except, perhaps, that there was in their love, more of earnestness and reality and less of dreaminess and fantastic affectation, than might be brought home to several modern nations. Their fables, however, and their poetry teem with ideas and examples of the loftiest and purest love, such love, I mean, as is natural to mankind, as harmonises with the structure of their minds, and the object and tendency of their passions, growing like the oak out of earth, but springing upward and rearing its majestic stature and beautiful foliage towards heaven. Thus Odysseus in Homer prefers the sunshine of a wife’s affection to immortality[[1194]] and the smiles of a sensual goddess. Hæmon with a tenderness carried to excess, spurns the blandishment of empire, nay, the very laws of duty and nature, that he may cling to the form of Antigone[[1195]] and join her in the grave. And Alcestis, rising above them all, quits in youth and health and beauty
“The warm precincts of the cheerful day,”
that she may preserve the existence of one beloved still more than life.[[1196]]
Nay, to prove the elevated conceptions of love that prevailed in earlier Greece, we find a personification of this passion reckoned among the most ancient gods of its mythology. Altars were erected, festivals instituted, sacrifices offered up to it, as to a power, in its origin and nature divine.[[1197]] It breathed the breath of life into their poetry, it was supposed to elicit music and verse from the coldest human clay, like the sun’s rays from the fabulous Memnon—it allied itself in its energies with freedom—to love, in the imagination of a Greek, was to cease to be a slave,[[1198]]—it emancipated and rendered noble whomsoever it inspired,—it floated winged through the air, and descended even in dreams[[1199]] upon the mind of men or women, revealing to sight the forms of persons unknown, annihilating distance, trampling over rank, confounding together gods and men by its irresistible force.[[1200]] Much of the beauty of their fables is concealed from us by the atmosphere of triteness and familiarity with which our injudicious education invests them. Every puling sonneteer babbles of Eros. And Aphrodite, a creature of the imagination brighter and lovelier than her own star, has been rendered more common in modern verse, than the most celebrated of her priestesses in ancient Corinth. But the poets of Greece possessed the art of clothing their gods in colours warm as life, varied as the rainbow; and as to Love, never was his influence more delicately shadowed forth than by him who introduces Endymion slumbering with unclosed lids on Mount Latmos, that the divinity of sleep might enjoy the brightness of his eyes![[1201]]
[1140]. From a passage in Terence (Phorm. i. 2. 30. sqq.) Perizonius concludes that even girls were sent to school. But he applies to Athenian maidens of free birth what in the Roman poet is related of a servile music girl: Ea serviebat lenoni impurissimo.—(Not. ad Ælian. Hist. Var. iii. 21.) It appears, however, from this passage, as Kuhn has already observed, that there existed public schools for girls at Athens, whatever might be the condition of the persons who frequented them. In Lambert Bos’s Antiquitates, (Pars. iv. c. 5. p. 216,) the error of Perizonius is repeated; that is, in the note; for, according to the text, the Attic virgins were closely confined to the house.
[1141]. Πολλὰς ἑορτὰς αἱ γυναῖκες ἔξω τῶν δημοτελῶν ἦγον ἰδία συνερχόμεναι.—Sch. Aristoph. Lysist. i. In Homer we find the Trojan women performing sacrifice to Athena—Il. ζ. 277. 310, just as the Athenian matrons did on the Acropolis.—Aristoph. Lysistr. 179.
[1142]. Suid. v. ἄρκτος. t. i. p. 425. c.—Sch. Aristoph. Lysistr. 645.—Meurs. Græc. Fer. lib. ii. p. 67.—During the dances performed in honour of this goddess, the women commonly played on brazen castanets.—Athen. xiv. 39.
[1143]. As Plato in his Republic appropriates to each sex a separate class of songs, it may be inferred that both in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, men and women habitually sung the same lays.—De. Legg. vii. t. viii. p. 30.