Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 82

In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they ignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two G.o.ddesses of love, one of whom, the celestial, presides--not over refined love between men and women, as we would say--but over the friendships between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired by the common G.o.ddess of sensual love. In Plato's _Symposium_ (181) this point is made clear by Pausanias:

"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul.... But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part,--she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the G.o.ddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her."

PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN

In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensual romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of view--even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in pa.s.sages which reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the _Laws_ (VI., 781) he declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding, in _Timaeus_ (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says gallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation;" and on another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by writing that the man

"who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pa.s.s into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired."

In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way between a man and a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men in capacity for virtue" (_Laws_, VI., 781); and his idea of enn.o.bling a woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in wrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be laughed at (_Republic_, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, will, in his ideal republic, go to war together.

"Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years, and for a woman if there appear any need of making use of her in military service, let the time of service be after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty years of age" (_Laws_, VI., 785).

Having thus abolished woman, except as a breeder of sons, Plato proceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. "The brave man is to have more wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such matters more than others" (_Republic_, V., 468). All wives, however, must be in common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be any choice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arranged by officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the bad with the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as is done in the breeding of animals. Maternal and filial love also must be abolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated in common. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than is necessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only object of marriage in Plato's opinion; for he recommends (_Laws_, VI., 784) that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, they should be "divorced for their mutual benefit."

In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than that presented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in his ideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thus degrading the relations of the s.e.xes to a level inferior in some respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most radical enemy love has ever known--practically a champion of promiscuity--has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to the purest and most exalted form of love![307]

SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE

Had Plato lived a few centuries earlier he might have visited at least one Greek state where his barbarous ideal of the s.e.xual relations was to a considerable extent realized. The Spartan law-maker Lycurgus shared his views regarding marriage, and had the advantage of being able to enforce them. He, too, believed that human beings should be bred like cattle. He laughed, so Plutarch tells us in his biographic sketch, at those who, while exercising care in raising dogs and horses, allowed unworthy husbands to have offspring. This, in itself, was a praiseworthy thought; but the method adopted by Lycurgus to overcome that objection was subversive of all morality and affection.

He considered it advisable that among worthy men there should be a community of wives and children, for which purpose he tried to suppress jealousy, ridiculing those who insisted on a conjugal monopoly and who even engaged in fights on account of it. Elderly men were urged to share their wives with younger men and adopt the children as their own; and if a man considered another's wife particularly prolific or virtuous he was not to hesitate to ask for her. Bridegrooms followed the custom of capturing their brides. An attendant, after cutting off the bride's hair and putting a man's garment on her, left her alone in the dark, whereupon her bridegroom visited her, returning soon, however, to his comrades. For months--sometimes until after children had been born--the husband would thus be unable to see his wife.

Reading Greek literature in the light of modern science, it is interesting to note that we have in the foregoing account unmistakable allusions to several primitive customs which have prevailed among savages and barbarians in all parts of the world.[308] The Greek writers, ignorant of the revelations of anthropology regarding the evolution of human habits, a.s.sumed such customs to have been originated by particular lawgivers. This was natural enough and pardonable under the circ.u.mstances; but how any modern writer can consider such customs (whether aboriginal or inst.i.tuted by lawgivers) especially favorable to love, pa.s.ses my comprehension. Yet one of the best informed of my critics a.s.sured me that "in Sparta love was made a part of state policy, and opportunities were contrived for the young men and women to see each other at public games and become enamored."

As usual in such cases, the writer ignores the details regarding these Spartan opportunities for seeing one another and falling in love, which would have spoiled his argument by indicating what kind of "love" was in question here.

Plutarch relates that Lycurgus made the girls strip naked and attend certain festivals and dance in that state before the youths, who were also naked. Bachelors who refused to marry were not allowed to attend these dances, which, as Plutarch adds with characteristic Greek navete, were "a strong incentive to marriage." The erudite C.O.

Muller, in his history of the Doric race (II., 298), while confessing that in all his reading of Greek books he had not come across a single instance of an Athenian in love with a free-born woman and marrying her because of a strong attachment, declares that Sparta was somewhat different, personal attachments having been possible there because the young men and women were brought together at festivals and dances; but he has the ac.u.men to see that this love was "not of a romantic nature."[309]

AMAZONIAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMANHOOD

Romantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent on s.e.xual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love are possible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiary s.e.xual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now the Spartans, besides maintaining all the love-suppressing customs just alluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their women into Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as were absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of the avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was to destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty. The law which forbade husbands to a.s.sociate with their wives in the daytime prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment between husband and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in case of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan inst.i.tutions relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the purpose of supplying the state with warriors. Not love, but patriotism, was the underlying motive of these inst.i.tutions. To patriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of these women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Brought up as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, when they wanted companionship, always sought it in a.s.sociation with comrades of their own s.e.x. In a word, instead of honoring the female s.e.x, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought on their own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairs at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands too.

And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the Amazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate man--has been lauded by a host of writers as emanc.i.p.ation and progress!

"If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides, thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Muller alludes to it in the following (II., 304):

"Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of Agis."

This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and courage to partic.i.p.ate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears to have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that "each s.e.x has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"

yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek att.i.tude to the end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.

Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.

Of their four princ.i.p.al G.o.ddesses--using the more familiar Latin names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno, as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on its higher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that "she is a G.o.ddess, not a G.o.d; but she has nothing of s.e.x except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the G.o.ddess, among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting and slaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin but ascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness--as unsympathetic a being as was ever conceived by human imagination--as unnatural and ludicrous as her devotee, the Hippolytus of Euripides. She is the Amazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of course she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their ultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, for example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle _(Eth. Nicom_., IV., 7), [Greek: to kallos en megalo somati, hoi mikroi d' asteioi kai summetroi, kaloi d' ou.]--"beauty consists in a large body; the pet.i.te are pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."[311]

ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM

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 companionship. 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 furnishing 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 worship 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 fashion 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 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 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 courtship. (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 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 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]