Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 93

This tale, which is probably of Babylonian origin, is related by Ovid (_Metamorph._, IV., 55-166), and was much admired and imitated in the Middle Ages. Comment on it would be superfluous after what I have written on pages 605-610.

[327] See Rohde, 130; Christ, 349.

[328] No more like stories of romantic love than these are the five "love-stories" written in the second century after Christ by Plutarch.

This is the more remarkable as Plutarch was one of the few ancient writers to whom at any rate the _idea_ occurred that women _might be_ able to feel and inspire a love rising above the senses. This suggestion is what distinguishes his _Dialogue on Love_ most favorably from Plato's _Symposium_, which it otherwise, however, resembles strikingly in the peculiar notions regarding the relation of the s.e.xes; showing how tenacious the unnatural Greek ideas were in Greek life. Plutarch's various writings show that though he had advanced notions compared with other Greeks, he was nearly as far from appreciating true femininity, chivalry, and romantic love as Lucian, who also wrote a dialogue on love in the old-fas.h.i.+oned manner.

[329] Hirschig's _Scriptores Erotici_ begins with Parthenius and includes Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon, Heliodorus, Chariton, etc.

The right-hand column gives a literal translation into Latin.

[330] _Der Griechische Roman_, 432-67. An excrescence of this theory is the foolish story that "Bishop" Heliodorus, being called upon by a provincial synod either to destroy his erotic books or to abdicate his position, preferred the latter alternative. The date of the real Heliodorus is perhaps the end of the third or the first half of the fourth century after Christ.

[331] He refers in a footnote to such scenes as are painted in I., 32, 4; II., 9, 11; III., 14, 24, 3; IV., 6, 3--scones and hypocritically nave experiments which he justly considers much more offensive than the notorious scene between Daphnis and Lykainion (III., 18).

[332] Rohde (516) tries to excuse Goethe for his ridiculous praise of this romance (Eckermann, II., 305, 318-321, 322) because he knew the story only in the French version of Amyot-Courier. But I find that this version retains most of the coa.r.s.eness of the original, and I see no reason for seeking any other explanation of Goethe's att.i.tude than his own indelicacy and obtuseness which, as I noted on page 208, made him go into ecstacies of admiration over a servant whom l.u.s.t prompted to attempt rape and commit murder. As for Professor Murray, his remarks are explicable only on the a.s.sumption that he has never read this story in the original. This is not a violent a.s.sumption. Some years ago a prominent professor of literature, ancient and modern, in a leading American university, hearing me say one day that _Daphnis and Chloe_ was one of the most immoral stories ever written, asked in a tone of surprise: "Have you read it in the original?" Evidently _he_ never had! It is needless to add that translations never exceed the originals in impropriety and usually improve on them. The Rev. Rowland Smith, who prepared the English version for Bohn's Library, found himself obliged repeatedly to resort to Latin.

Apart from his coa.r.s.eness, there is nothing in Longus's conception of love that goes beyond the ideas of the Alexandrians. Of the symptoms of true love--mental or sentimental, esthetic and sympathetic, altruistic and supersensual, he knows no more than Sappho did a thousand years before him. Indeed, in making lovers become indolent, cry out as if they had been beaten, and jump into rivers as if they were afire, he is even cruder and more absurd than Sappho was in her painting of sensual pa.s.sion. His whole idea of love is summed up in what the old shepherd Philetas says to Daphnis and Chloe (II., 7): [Greek: _Egvov d' ego kai tauron erasthenta kai hos oistro plaegeis emukato, kai tragon philaesanta aiga kai aekolouthei pantachou. Autos men gar aemaen neos kai aerasthen Amarullidos_].

[333] See Rehde, 345; on Musaeus, 472, 133.

[334] Lucii Apulei _Metamorphoseon_, Libri XI., Ed. van der Vliet (_Teubner_), IV., 89-135.

[335] See the remarks on _Tristan and Isolde_ in my _Wagner and his Works_, II., 138.