paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American
Languages" (_Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, vol.
xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these
languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1)
inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or
similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4)
assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these
same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words
of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable
fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow
in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks
that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early
Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy
of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring
strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.
Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.
This has been well brought out by E.F.M. Benecke in his
_Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek
Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is
highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek
lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women
before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love
for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric
poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of
pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares
marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be
complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female
boy-friends." AEschylus makes even a father assume that his
daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no
sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women
who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual
love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on,
and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.
It was in Magna Graecia rather than in Greece itself that men took
interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period,
and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of
women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the