et a bad example in his _Hippolytus_, and still more his
_Aeolus_, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularly
admired and imitated by the later writers.[319] Aristophanes is
proverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity. Concerning the
plays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments have
come down to us and Latin versions of several by Terence and Plautus),
Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by one
bond--love; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, and
always involving a hetaira or at most a [Greek: pseudokorae] or
_demie-vierge_, since respectable girls could not be involved in
realistic Greek love-affairs.

Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegance
with which Menander covers up his moral rottenness, and which made him
the favorite of the _jeunesse doree_ of his time, exerted a bad
influence on the stage through many centuries. There are a few
quasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, but
they are not supported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphere
of sentimentality into that of sentiment. Here again I may adduce
Rohde as an unbiassed witness. While declaring that there is "a
longing for the ennobling of the passion in actual life" he admits
that

"really _sentimental effusions_ of love are strikingly rare
in Plautus and Terence.[320] One might think the authors of
the Latin versions had omitted the sentimental passages,
were it not that in the remnants of the Newer Comedy of the
Attic writers themselves there are, apart from general
references to Eros, no traces whatever of sentimental
allusions."[321]

THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS

Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whether
we can find a purer and more genuinely romantic atmosphere in the
works of her leading poets. Of these the first in time and fame is
Theocritus. He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love; and he
does resemble Sappho in two respects. Like her, he often glorifies
unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third
Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the
original to throw the whole book away in disgust. Like Sappho and the
Hindoos (and some modern Critics) he also seems to imagine that the
chief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, as
we see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl