The documents
of the Hebrews, like those of the Hindoos and Persians, Greeks, and
Romans, prove that tender, refined, and unselfish affection between
the sexes, far from being one of the first shoots of civilization, is
its last and most beautiful flower.

GREEK LOVE-STORIES AND POEMS

The most obstinate disbeliever in the doctrine that romantic love,
instead of being one of the earliest products of civilization, is one
of the latest, will have to capitulate if it can be shown that even
the Greeks, the most cultivated and refined nation of antiquity, knew
it only in its sensual and selfish side, which is not true love, but
self-love. In reality I have already shown this to be the case
incidentally in the sections in which I have traced the evolution of
the fourteen ingredients of love. In the present chapter, therefore,
we may confine ourselves chiefly to a consideration of the stories and
poems which have fostered the belief I am combating. But first we must
hear what the champions of the Greeks have to say in their behalf.

CHAMPIONS OF GREEK LOVE

Professor Rohde declares emphatically (70) that "no one would be so
foolish as to doubt the existence of pure and strong love" among the
ancient Greeks. Another eminent German scholar, Professor Ebers,
sneers at the idea that the Greeks were not familiar with the love we
know and celebrate. Having been criticised for making the lovers in
his ancient historic romances act and talk and express their feelings
precisely as modern lovers in Berlin or Leipsic do, he wrote for the
second edition of his _Egyptian Princess_ a preface in which he tries
to defend his position. He admits that he did, perhaps, after all, put
too warm colors on his canvas, and frankly confesses that when he
examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up
his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend. He
admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the
sexes; yet he thinks it "quite conceivable that a Greek heart should
have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart," and he
refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof
that they knew love in our sense of the word--such stories as
Apuleius's _Cupid and Psyche_, Homer's portrait of Penelope,
Xenophon's tale of Panthea and Abradates.

"Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been
unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice,