mantic elements in
Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis. He held that
Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had passed away,
was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous
love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic
friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is
"the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love and that
such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's
life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure
figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost,
and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of
his wife--a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon--and
consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he
brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad
tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated
an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.

[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:

[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].

[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details. Helbig remarks that
the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by
preference incestuous passions, "and it appears that such passions
were not rare in actual life too in those times."

[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., _Asin._, III., 3, particularly
v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that "a very sentimental character is
Charinus in the _Mercator_;" and he also points to Ter., _Eun._, 193
ff.

[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde's use
of the word "sentimental" refers, according to his own definition, to
egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment. Of
sentimentality--altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery--there is
enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of
life. But when, in the third act of the _Asinaria_, the lover says to
his girl, "If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once
would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours,"
we promptly ask, "_Would he have done it_?" And the answer, from all
we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been
the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the
twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus: "_Now_ you promise me everything,
but aft