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_ It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that, according to Helbig, "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 assume 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]
[FOOTNOTE 315: See Anthon, 258, and the authors there referred to.]
A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian "gallantry" is to be found in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets were called upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of her locks. The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course, make the slightest difference in this kind of homage.
Unlike his colleagues, Rohde was not misled into accepting such _adulation of queens_ as evidence of _adoration of women in general_. In several pages of admirable erudition, which I commend to all students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness and artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry. Fashion ordained that poems should be addressed to women of exalted rank:
"As the queens were, like the kings, enrolled among the gods, the court-poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy--so well-known through the imitation of Catullus--on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy of the astronomer Conon."
[FOOTNOTE 316: See Theocritus, Idyll XVII. Regarding the silly and degrading adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature, see also Christ's _Griechische Litteraturgeschichte_, 493-494 and 507.]
He then proceeds to explain that we must be careful not to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed the freedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments.
"In actual life a certain chivalrous attitude toward women existed at most toward hetairai, in which case, as a matter of course, it was adulterated with a very unpleasant ingredient of frivolous sentimentality.... Of an essential change in the position of respectable girls and women there is no indication."
Though there were a number of learned viragoes, there is "absolutely no evidence" that women in general received the compliment and benefit of an education. The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those of Propertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed only to the wanton hetairai. As late as our first century Plutarch felt called upon to write a treatise, oti kai gunaikas paideuteon--"that women too should be educated." Cornelius Nepos still speaks of the gynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time.
"In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the seclusion of their jealous confinement would have implied a revolution in all social arrangements of the Greeks of which we have no intimation anywhere,"
including Alexandria. In another chapter, Rohde comments (354-356) with documentary proof, on the "extraordinary tenacity," with which the Greeks down to the latest periods of their literature, clung to their custom of regarding and treating women as inferiors and servants--a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalry and adoration. That sympathy also--and consequently true, altruistic affection--continued to be wanting in their emotional life is indicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that "the most palpable mark of a higher respect," an education, was withheld from the women to the end of the Hellenic period.[317]
[FOOTNOTE 317: I have given Professor Rohde's testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing. A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians. The _Andromeda_ of Euripides, he declares, "became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love." This, however, is a pure assumption on his part, not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved. Benecke has devoted a special "Excursus" to this play , in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature "need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides's day is the conception of the '_galante Ritter_' setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing." He might have brought out the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. "Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster _if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry_. The contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda." Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death. A mediaeval knight, or a modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward. The difference is further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, "Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave." Professor Murray, who cites this line in his _History of Greek Literature_, remarks with comic naivete: "The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before." But what is there so remarkably "pure and happy" in a girl's offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life? Were not Greek women always expected to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice? Was not _Alcestis_ written to enforce that principle of conduct? And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modern ideas of chivalrous love?
Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic 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.] _
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