________________________________________________
_ Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period both in Egypt and in Greece (Menander and the New Comedy) is that a regard for purity enters as a new element into its literature. It does, in some instances, less, however, as a virtue than as a _bonne bouche_ for epicures,[318] as is made most patent in that offshoot of the Alexandrian manner, the abominably _raffine_ story of Daphnis and Chloe. There may also be traces of that "longing for an ennobling of the passion of love" of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favorite usage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greek literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its coarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural. The old epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though Euripides set 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.
[FOOTNOTE 318: Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12:
[Greek: hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].
[FOOTNOTE 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."]
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]
[FOOTNOTE 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.]
[FOOTNOTE 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 afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a procuress. From the point of view of purity the _Captivi_ is particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue Plautus himself--who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin--makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which "there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira--which are the staple features of these later Greek plays.] _
Read next: Theocritus And Callimachus
Read previous: Alexandrian Chivalry
Table of content of Greek Love-Stories and Poems
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
