One more species of pseudo-self-sacrifice remains to be considered.  When Hero finds Leander’s dead body on the rocks she commits suicide.  Is not this self-sacrifice for love’s sake?  It is always so considered, and Eckstein, in his eagerness to prove that the ancient Greeks knew romantic love,[37] gives a list of six legendary suicides from hopeless or foiled love.  The question of suicide is an interesting one and will be considered in detail in the chapter on the American Indians, who, like other savages, were addicted to it, in many cases for the most trivial reasons.  In this place I will content myself with noting that if Eckstein had taken the pains to peruse the four volumes of Ramdohr’s Venus Urania (a formidable task, I admit), he would have found an author who more than a hundred years ago knew that suicide is no test of true love.  There are indeed, he says (III., 46), plenty of old stories of self-sacrifice, but they are all of the kind where a man risks comfort and life to secure possession of a coveted body for his own enjoyment, or else where he takes his own life because he feels lonely after having failed to secure the desired union.  These actions are no index of love, for they “may coexist with the cruelest treatment” of the coveted woman.  Very ambitious persons or misers may commit suicide after losing honor or wealth, and

“a coarse negro, in face of the danger of losing his sweetheart, is capable of casting himself into the ocean with her, or of plunging his dagger into her breast and then into his own.”

All this is selfish.  The only true index of love, Ramdohr continues, lies in the sacrifice of one’s own happiness for another’s sake; in resigning one’s self to separation from the beloved, or even to death, if that is necessary to secure her happiness or welfare.  Of such self-sacrifice he declares he cannot find a single instance in the records and stories of the ancients; nor can I.

The suicide of Dido after her desertion by Aeneas is often cited as proof of love, but Ramdohr insists (338) that, apart from the fact that “a woman really in love would not have pursued Aeneas with curses,” such an act as hers was the outcome of purely selfish despair, on a par with the suicide of a miser after the loss of his money.  It is needless to add to this that Hero’s suicide was likewise selfish; for of what possible benefit was it to the dead Leander that she took her own life in a cowardly fit of despondency at having lost her chief source of delight?  Had she lost her life in an effort to save his, the case would have been different.