E. F. M. Benecke

“ The manliness, the dignity, the courtesy of it, are patent in every line; more striking still to those who know Greek literature is the spirit of self-negation which pervades the whole; and all this, combined with a passion which is none the less real because it is kept rigorously under control. Even in Alexandrian times it would be hard to find a poem addressed to a woman which can equal this in its chivalrous tone; to look for such a poem in early Greek literature would be vain indeed. ”

“ The feeling on passing from the Middle to the New Comedy is like the fresh air on coming out of the bar of a public-house. The Middle Comedy is the last decaying branch of the old literature; the romantic New Comedy is one of the earliest and most vigorous offshoots of that new literature which sprang from the genius of Antimachus, and has continued to the present day. ”

“ It was a bold thing to introduce personal feelings at all into these choral odes, for a certain odour of sanctity was still hanging about them, and the Greeks had a natural aversion to the public expression of all violent emotions; but to have introduced anything so entirely sensual as woman’s love was then felt to be would not have been allowed. If love was to be tolerated at all, it must be that form of love which was generally recognised as dignified and ennobling. This amalgamation of ceremonial and personal poetry does not seem to have been popular or to have found imitators. ”

“ The story of the Iliad is a story without a heroine, a feature which makes it well-nigh unique among national legends. This fact has struck various people, and has been accounted for in various ways, the favourite explanation, perhaps, being that the Greek imagination was severer and more self-controlled, more statuesque, one may almost say, than that of other primitive peoples, and was therefore content with a hero whose sole inspiration lay in love of glory and love of battle, apart from any gentler emotion whatever. ”

“ When once the romantic element is cut clear from all extraneous entanglements, so that it is possible to recognise what it really is, it becomes, I think, immediately evident that neither Euripides nor Menander can have much to do with its origin. The leading motive of romance is the idea that pure love for a woman may justifiably form the chief interest in a man’s life. But this idea, as I hope to be able to show clearly, does not appear in literature until after the time of Euripides, while it is already to be found fully developed before the time of Menander. ”

“ Sappho loved a woman because her love was too pure to allow her to love a man. All this sounds strange—monstrous almost—to modern ears; and yet, of all the scandal of the centuries which has heaped itself up around the name of Lesbos, what Sappho herself would have resented most would perhaps have been the story that she was in love with Phaon.
We have already had occasion to notice that Anacreon, while he was the originator of love-poetry addressed to women, at the same time addressed a large number of his poems, in fact, the majority, to boys. ”

“ Comedy is not, as a rule, sufficiently recognised. People speak as if they thought that the stories in Menander, for instance, represented the ordinary events of life at Athens at the end of the fourth century. It need hardly, perhaps, be remarked that it would be about as reasonable to endeavour to get an idea of the ordinary life of English people at the present day by studying an Adelphi melodrama. As long as comedy at Athens confined itself to social satire, it is obvious that the social scenes it depicted must have been, even if somewhat burlesqued, yet, on the whole, true to life. ”

“ For it cannot be too strongly emphasised that those who wish to study the development of love, as we now know it, must commence their studies with an examination of this essentially primitive emotion. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that love, as it now exists, has been evolved, not from the sexual instinct, but from the companionship of the battle-field, that the first real lovers the world ever knew were comrades in arms. The Iliad of Homer is a love story, its heroes Achilles and Patroclus; the Ajax of Sophocles is a love story, its heroes Ajax and Teucer. ”

“ It may sound strange to say so, but in all probability we to-day understand Andromache better than did the Greeks for whom she was created; better, too, perhaps than did her creator himself.
In the Odyssey, well nigh the entire action is in the hands of women. What with Athene and Leucothea, Circe and Calypso, Nausicaa and Penelope, Odysseus himself hardly comes to the fore at all; and yet it [11] cannot be said that anywhere from beginning to end is there so much as a suggestion of a love-motive. ”

“ Assuming that the way of regarding women at Athens rendered it difficult or impossible to interest [39] an Athenian audience with a love-story, as between man and woman, why should not the tragedians have made more use of the many stories that told of the love of men for men? If, it may be argued, this form of love was really so important an element in the life of the time, if it really occupied that place in the hearts of men as a whole that is now occupied by the love of women, why did Aeschylus and Sophocles only devote a couple of plays between them to its treatment? ”

“ All discussion with reference to them must therefore be based on suppositions and an examination of relative probabilities. The risks of error in entering on such doubtful ground are manifestly infinite, and conclusions can be reached only through the accumulation of a mass of evidence, the separate particles of which are often in themselves of very little weight; the veil of darkness covering all such Greek literature as does not bear the hall-mark of Athens is so thick that it is perhaps no longer possible for the real truth about it ever to be known. ”

“ In the Middle Comedy, we are still face to face with the women of typical Athens, with the women of Aristophanes, at best with the women of Euripides,—and with the way in which typical Athens treated these women; in the New Comedy this is changed, and woman—the woman that can be loved as wife and mother—steps into her true place as object of, and partner in, the intensest and the purest passions of which humanity is capable.
It will be remembered that the Middle Comedy treatment, of women and love for women, had four main characteristics. ”

“ Mimnermus had said that life without love was not worth living, but his was hardly the love to last after his lady’s death. Simonides had sung the charms of the ideal housekeeper, but one would not expect to find emotional poetry addressed even to the most perfect housekeeper, as such. Euripides had expatiated on the powers and the capabilities of women; but there is a difference between regarding a woman as a particularly cunning and dangerous sort of beast, and regarding her as a fit object for a life’s devotion. ”

“ As regards the first, no one, of course, would wish to deny that the sexual instinct, in its most sensual form, has often played a prominent part in what is unquestionably love-poetry; but the sexual instinct can never of itself supply the fundamental basis of the feeling necessary for the production of such poetry. Woman, regarded merely as a source of pleasure or convenience, can no more be an object of love than a bottle of brandy or a railway train. ”

“ Why is it Thrasonides, the Miles Gloriosus whom all the Comedians are banded together to ridicule, who appears as the most chivalrous lover of the whole of New Comedy? [307] Why is a man who is universally regarded as a fool, made to give expression to such elevated sentiments, and to follow such a noble line of conduct? ”

“ Unless he can feel that she loves him, none of those privileges, which, to the ordinary Hetaera-lover of the day, would have been of themselves the complete consummation of love, are of any value to him. ἔξεστί μοι τοῦτο καὶ βούλομαι, οὐ ποιῶ δέ.
The aim of the lover is not to gratify himself, but to inspire love. [305] That we are here face to face with a form of love which is not only actually absent from Middle Comedy, but is by nature absolutely foreign to that literature and could not possibly appear in it, is too obvious to need further emphasis. ”

“ The first and, perhaps, the most striking feature in the Aristophanic treatment of women—a feature which is very prominent indeed in certain plays—is the respect which the poet professes to feel for women’s judgment and powers of organisation. Thus, in the Lysistrata, the treaty between Athens and Sparta, which is admitted on all sides to be desirable, can only be brought about through the intervention of a woman. ”

“ Women in Greek Poetry
Greek literature may be divided roughly into two parts, the earlier school which culminated at Athens, and the later school which culminated at Alexandria. The obvious differences between these two schools of art have often been described, and there is no need to dwell on them here; but the great, the essential difference between them has been too generally ignored.
The chief inspiring element of all art is love; and it is in their inspiration—that is to say, in their view of love—that the real difference between the two schools consists. ”

“ If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the gratification of their sensual desires, their “love” immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or self-sacrifice for the [54] good of the loved person, as distinct from one’s own, is absolutely unknown. “Love is irresistible,” they say, and, in obedience to its commands, they sit down to reckon how they can satisfy themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of their passion.
Love is irresistible still, one knows, as irresistible now as ever it was in Greece, but the impulse it gives has a different direction. ”

“ It has troubled the minds of many modern commentators to think why Sappho should have addressed love-poems to Anactoria; for those who have formed a true idea of what “love” between a man and a woman meant in Greece of the seventh century, and compared this with the love then existing among men for one another, the question answers itself. Sappho, in addressing love-poems to Anactoria, was but adapting to her own circumstances and sex the universal contemporary principles of love-poetry. ”

“ Aeschylus, then, has little enough to say about women; but in Sophocles there is fortunately somewhat more to be found; indeed, it is probably the female characters of Sophocles that are most generally appreciated by modern readers. And yet, for all the great part played by women in the Sophoclean drama, the part played by women’s love is wonderfully small.
Take a woman like Deianira; the man who can listen to her without feeling a positive shock must be more in sympathy with Athens than I ever wish to be. ”

“ That relation between men and women which we call the “romantic” is founded upon sentiments and ideas which are entirely distinct from the sexual emotions. Euripides, as we have had occasion to notice again and again, though he had carefully studied the sexual instinct in all its workings, had never been able to conceive of a relation between man and woman which had not this for its basis. [119] Without pure—I had almost said Platonic—love for its fundamental principle, romance is an impossibility. ”

“ The subjective lyric literature of early Greece, which extends roughly over the seventh and sixth centuries, and lasts on, in a desultory sort of way, into the fifth, is chiefly Ionian, and introduces one to a very different state of society from that of the heroic age. The actual social and intellectual position of women is, in the main, a very low one; and in other respects also the place which they occupy in the interests of men is very insignificant. But this is not all. The ideal woman of the time is not one to whom love-poetry could be addressed. ”

“ To put it perfectly crudely, the Euripidean woman who “falls in love” (it is of women we are speaking now) thinks first of all, “How can I seduce the man I love?” The modern woman thinks, “How can I die for him?” This is the difference between ancient and modern love, and in Euripides the old is still untouched by the new. [96]
[55]
It is this sensual, this well-nigh mechanical view of love which makes possible that conception of the ideal wife, of which we have already spoken in the case of Sophocles’ Deianira, and which is so strongly insisted upon in the Andromache of Euripides. ”

“ Nothing would have been more natural, one would have thought, than that he should, in the course of some of his highly-coloured pictures of primeval felicity before the days of Euripides and the philosophers, have dwelt upon the purity of ancient family life and the chastity of a previous generation of women, in contrast to that present depravity to which he makes such frequent allusion. ”

“ And in the choral poetry sung in honour of Dionysus, from which tragedy had its rise, it is obvious, when one considers the intimate connection between the rites of Dionysus and Artemis, and the ascetic principle underlying their worship, how especially out of place a love-element would have been.
The fact, therefore, that love as between man and man does not play any very prominent part in the early tragedies, must simply be explained by the Greek dislike to the public display of violent private emotions. ”