Part 82 (2/2)
Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we examine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, we find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially in Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respect Athens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestled naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted to witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the Athenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these words:
”Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife, leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No!
a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would, who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her robe float free, to share with youth their races and their sports--customs I cannot away with. Is it any wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue?”
The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spartan educate his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]
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 a.s.sociating with hetairai for pleasant companions.h.i.+p. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III., 337), though we come across stories of pa.s.sionate love in the pages of Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, ”sensuality was always the soil from which such pa.s.sion 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sume 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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, chast.i.ty, incest, affect and modify their _feelings_ in relation to them, thus furnis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion, not an enn.o.bling, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 l.u.s.t. If literature has any historic value at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are ent.i.tled 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 lat.i.tude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.
We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to such love as is recorded in the prose and verse of Cla.s.sical Greece, and having found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must now examine briefly what traces of it may occur in the much-vaunted erotic poems and stories of Greater Greece, notably the capital of Egypt in the third century before Christ.
It is true that of the princ.i.p.al poets of the Alexandrian school--Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius--only the last named was probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their home and sphere of influence, being attracted by the great library, which contained all the treasures of Greek literature, and other inducements which the Ptolemies held out to men of letters. Thus it is permissible to speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek literature, all the more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gave this literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well as otherwise, which tinged Greek writings from that time on.
In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only of stories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories. Even the relations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romantic opportunities, are treated in an amazingly prosaic manner. An emphatic change in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come to Euripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and their feelings more attention than they had previously received in literature. Aristophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to his indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlasting Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.
Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them that the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with following the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages again, G.o.ds as well as heroes, but in a very different fas.h.i.+on from that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their hearts' content, the G.o.ds being represented as sharing all the amorous weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks (107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their loves.
The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths undoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and their imitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of the Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who made love (sensual love, I mean)--which had played so subordinate a role in the old epics and tragedies--the central feature of interest, thus setting a fas.h.i.+on which has continued without interruption to the present day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of a specialist (155): ”Les Alexandrins n'ont pas invente l'amour dans la litterature ... mais ils ont cree la litterature de l'amour.” Their way of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets, especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek novelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton, Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are uncertain) of our era.
There is a ”suprising similarity” in the descriptions of love-affairs by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages (145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fas.h.i.+on of German professors) to detailed proof of his a.s.sertion. The substance of these pages, may, however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads. In all these writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious festivals, as those were practically the only occasions where such women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight, no other being possible under circ.u.mstances that permit of no prolonged courts.h.i.+p. (3) The youth is represented as having previously felt a coy, proud aversion to the G.o.ddess of love, who now avenges herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening pa.s.sion. (4) The love is mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5) Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fas.h.i.+on of the Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to some one of the G.o.ds or G.o.ddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures and statues--a characteristically Greek device, going back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The pa.s.sion of the lovers is a genuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes them neglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate with blushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with the beloved; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell their woes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathize with them. (15) The pa.s.sion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for other cares, serving only to aggravate it. (16) Like Orientals, the lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) The lover cuts the beloved's name into trees, follows her footsteps, consults the flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and at the banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup.
Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses frankly that it ”embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplest symptoms of love.” But instead of drawing therefrom the obvious inference that love which has no other symptoms than those is very far from being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that ”in its _essential_ traits, this pa.s.sion _is presumably_ the same at all times and with all nations.”[314]
ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY.
It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that, according to Helbig (194), ”we first meet traits that suggest the adoration of women (_Frauencultus_) and gallantry.” This opinion is widely prevalent, a special instance being that ecstatic exclamation of Professor Ebers: ”Can we a.s.sume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies?” In reality this act was inspired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connection with love.
The story in brief is as follows: Shortly after his marriage to Berenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria. To insure his safe return to Egypt Berenice vowed to consecrate her beautiful hair to Venus. On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple; but on the following day her hair could not be found. To console the king and the queen, and to _conciliate the royal favor_, the astronomer Conon declared that the locks of Berenice had been removed by divine interposition and transferred to the skies in the form of a constellation.[315]
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