But what is not.”
Gyges, with the ruthless resolution of an Oriental, forms his plan at once, and coolly works it out. He procures himself to be elected one of the mission to the king, and on arriving at the capital, dishonours the queen, murders his master, and ascends the throne.[[1811]]
This may be regarded as a specimen of the shepherds’ tales.[[1812]] But they moved for the most part in an atmosphere of superstition, had ceremonies of their own, a mythology of their own, and of the whole the pervading spirit was love. In communities highly civilised, this passion commonly degenerates into a plaything, despised when weak, and mischievous when strong. It is otherwise in the early stages of society. There, in proportion to their freedom from the aspirations and anxieties of ambition, men seek happiness in the cultivation of the affections. The society of women is to them all in all. And the evils that infest them, disturb their quiet, and engender crime, spring, too, from the same bitter-sweet fountain, which flows with honey or gall according to the temper of those who drink of it. Consequently, in contemplating the pastoral life of Greece, we must beware not to overlook the shepherdesses,[[1813]] those heroines of Bucolic poetry, whose freshness and nature still survive in Theocritus, and other fragments of antiquity, and may operate as an antidote to that insipid spawn whose loves and lamentations affect us like ipecacuanha in modern pastorals.
In these latitudes of society, at least, women enjoyed their freedom, and the glimpses presented to us of them as they there existed may be regarded among the chief charms of Greek poetry. Only, for example, observe the picture which Chæremon the Flower Poet, has delineated of a bevy of beautiful virgins sporting by moonlight:
“There one reclined apart I saw, within the moon’s pale light,
With bosom through her parted robe appearing snowy white;
Another danced, and floating free her garments in the breeze
She seemed as buoyant as the wave that leaps o’er summer seas.
While dusky shadows all around shrunk backward from the place,
Chased by the beaming splendour shed like sunshine from her face: