If a romantic love-poem were necessarily a poem of romantic love, the specimens of amorous hyperbole cited in the preceding pages would indicate that the ancients knew love as we know it.  In reality, however, there is not, in all the examples cited, the slightest evidence of genuine love.  A passion which is merely sensual may inspire a gifted poet to the most extravagantly fanciful expressions of covetous admiration, and in all the cases cited there is nothing beyond such sensual admiration.  An African Harari compares the girl he likes to “sweet milk fresh from the cow,” and considers that coarse remark a compliment because he knows love only as an appetite.  A gypsy poet compares the shoulders of his beloved to “wheat bread,” and a Turkish poem eulogizes a girl for being like “bread fried in butter.”  (Ploss, L, 85, 89.)

The ancient poets had too much taste to reveal their amorous desires quite so bluntly as an appetite, yet they, too, never went beyond the confines of self-indulgence.  When Propertius says a girl’s cheeks are like roses floating on milk; when Tibullus declares another girl’s eyes are bright enough to light a torch by; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim:  “Surely you must carry about a bee on your lips, they are full of honey, your kisses wound”—­what is all this except a revelation that the poet thinks the girl pretty, that her beauty gives him pleasure, and that he tries to express that pleasure by comparing her to some other object—­sun, moon, honey, flowers—­that pleases his senses?  Nowhere is there the slightest indication that he is eager to give her pleasure, much less that he would be willing to sacrifice his own pleasures for her, as a mother, for instance, would for a child.  His hyperboles, in a word, tell us not of love for another but of a self-love in which the other figures only as a means to an end, that end being his own gratification.

When Anacreon wishes he were the gown worn by a girl, or the water that laves her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does not indicate the least desire to make her happy, but an eagerness to please himself by coming in contact with her.  The daintiest poetic conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact.  Even the most fanciful of all forms of amorous hyperbole—­that in which the lover imagines that all nature smiles or weeps with him—­what is it but the most colossal egotism conceivable?

The amorous hyperbole of the ancients is romantic in the sense of fanciful, fictitious, extravagant, but not in the sense in which I oppose romantic love to selfish sensual infatuation.  There is no intimation in it of those things that differentiate love from lust—­the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration, sympathy, and affection, of the men.  When one of Goethe’s characters says:  “My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;” or when one of Lessing’s characters exclaims:  “To live apart from