“Happy they who find the goddess come in moderate might, sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite’s gift of marriage and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions....  Be mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek:  hosioi] 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."[304]

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 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