Greek Love In Africa

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_ 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 latitude 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 Classical 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 principal 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, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion from that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their hearts' content, the gods 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 fashion 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 fashion of German professors) to detailed proof of his assertion. 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 circumstances that permit of no prolonged courtship. (3) The youth is represented as having previously felt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avenges herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (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 fashion 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 gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures and statues--a characteristically Greek device, going back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion 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 passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for other cares, serving only to aggravate it. Like Orientals, the lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. 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 passion _is presumably_ the same at all times and with all nations."[314]

[FOOTNOTE 314: Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim "If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts." He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds: "but they _must_ have known them all the same." To give one instance of his contradictory procedure. On page 70 he admits that, as women were situated, the tender and passionate courtship of the youths as described in poems and romances of the period "could hardly have been copied from life," because the Greek custom of allowing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting their wishes was incompatible with the poetry of such courting. "It is very significant," he adds, "that among the numerous references to the ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers, including those of the Hellenistic [Alexandrian] period, and collected by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 72 of his _Florilegium_, love is never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice." In the next sentence he declares nevertheless that "no one would be so foolish as to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this period;" and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in the literature of this period these traits _had not yet taken hold of the life of these men_, though there were _longings_ for them. And at the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back-down by declaring that "the very essence of sentimental poetry is the _longing for what does not exist_." (_Ist doch das rechte Element gerade der sentimentalen Poesie die Sehnsucht nach dem nicht Vorhandenen_.) What makes this admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of "sentimental" elements, does not even use that word as the adjective of sentiment but of sentimentality. He defines this _Sentimentalitaet_ to which he refers as a "_ Sehnen, Sinnen und Hoffen_," a "_Selbstgenuss der Leidenschaft_"--a "longing, dreaming, and hoping," a "revelling in (literally, self-enjoying of) passion." In other words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion's sake, a gloating over one's selfish joys and sorrows. Now in this respect I actually go beyond Rohde as a champion of Greek love! Such _Sentimentalitaet_ existed, I am convinced, in Alexandrian life as well as in Alexandrian literature; but of the existence of true supersensual altruistic _sentiment_ I can find no evidence. The trouble with Rohde, as with so many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of the distinction between sensual love, which is selfish (_Selbstgenuss_) and romantic love, which is altruistic; hence he flounders in hopeless contradictions.] _

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