self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions. Be mine delight in moderate and hallowed (ooo) desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess therein."

To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in the loves of gods and goddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, and the lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in Hippolytus :

"O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion borne, flits the god of love, maddening the heart and beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris, thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them all." 1

ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE

The Greeks, instead of confuting my theory that romantic love is the last product of civilization, afford the most striking confirmation of it. While considering the love-affairs of Africans, Australians, and other uncivilized peoples, we were dealing with races whose lack of intelligence and delicacy in general made it natural to expect that their love, too, must be wanting in psychic qualities and refinement. But the Greeks were of a different calibre. Not only their men of affairs-generals and statesmen-but their men of thought and feeling-philosophers and poets-were among the greatest the world has ever seen; yet these philosophers and poets-who, as everywhere, must have been far above the emotional level of their countrymen in general-knew nothing of romantic love. What makes this the more remarkable is that, so far as their minds were concerned, they were quite capable of experiencing such a feeling. Indeed, they were actually familiar with the psychic and altruistic ingredients of love; sympathy, devotion, self-sacrifice, affection, are sometimes manifested in their dramas and stories when dealing with the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, or pairs of friends like

1 The unduly extolled 'Eows chorus in the Antigone expresses nothing more than this universal power of love in the Greek conception of the term.

Orestes and Pylades. And strangest of all, they actually had a kind of romantic love, which, except for one circumstance, is much like modern romantic love.

Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments that remain to us of his lost tragedies is one from Dictys, in which occurs this sentiment: "He was my friend, and never did love lead me to folly or to Cypris. Yes, there is another kind of love, love for the soul, honorable, continent, and good. Surely men should have passed a law that only the chaste and self-contained should love, and Cypris [Venus] should have been banished." Now it is very interesting to note that Euripides was a friend of Socrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science of love, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this science in several of their works. In Xenophon's Symposium Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything else in the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather give all he had to the beloved than receive twice the amount from another; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone; rather work and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, he continues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers "makes them more generous, more eager to exert themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers, nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite urges them."

Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the Symposium and Phædrus, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phædrus and Pausanius in the Symposium (175-78), in which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to us. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than a virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than do a cowardly or dishonorable deed; and love would make an inspired hero out of the veriest coward. "Love will make men dare to die for the beloved-love alone.” "The actions of a

lover have a grace which ennobles them."

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"From this point

of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing." There is a dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power." "For when the lover and beloved come. together. the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one." And in the Republic (VI., 485): "He whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections." 1

All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one circumstance-a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is an ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas the romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato-so-called "Platonic love"-has nothing whatever to do with women. It is a passionate, romantic friendship between men and boys, which (whether it really existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble, exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros. On this point they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for a Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act of sacrificing her life for her husband -that is her ideal function, as we have seen-so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her life; yet Plato tells us distinctly (Symp., 180) that this phase of feminine. love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles to give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend Patroclus. What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from the lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and this kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women. In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they ignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two goddesses of love, one of whom,

1 In Müller's book on the Doric race we read (310) that the love of the Corinthian Philolaus and Diocles "lasted until death," and even their graves were turned toward one another, in token of their affection. Lovers in Athens carved the beloved's names on walls, and innumerable poems were addressed by the leading bards to their favorites.

the celestial, presides-not over refined love between men and women, as we would say-but over the friendships between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired by the common goddess of sensual love. In Plato's Symposium (181) this point is made clear by Pausanias :

"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul.

.. But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part,— she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her."

PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN

In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, supersensual romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of view-even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages which reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the Laws (VI., 781) he declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding, in Timæus (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says gallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation;" and on another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by writing that the man who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired."

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In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way

between a man and a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men in capacity for virtue" (Laws, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling a woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in wrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be laughed at (Republic, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, will, in his ideal republic, go to war together. "Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years, and for a woman if there appear any need of making use of her in military service, let the time of service be after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty years of age" (Laws, VI., 785).

Having thus abolished woman, except as a breeder of sons, Plato proceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. "The brave man is to have more wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such matters more than others" (Republic, V., 468). All wives, however, must be in common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be any choice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arranged by officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the bad with the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as is done in the breeding of animals. Maternal and filial love also must be abolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated in common. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than is necessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only object of marriage in Plato's opinion; for he recommends (Laws, VI., 784) that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, they should be "divorced for their mutual benefit."

In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than that presented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in his ideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thus degrading the relations of the sexes to a level inferior in some respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most radical enemy love has ever known-practically a champion of promiscuity-has, by a