“Can’st count the leaves in a forest, the waves in the sea?  Then tell me how oft I have loved.  Twenty girls in Athens, and fifteen more besides; add to these whole bevies in Corinth, and from Lesbos to Ionia, from Caria and from Rhodos, two thousand sweethearts more....  Two thousand did I say?  That includes not those from Syros, from Kanobus, from Creta’s cities, where Eros rules alone, nor those from Gadeira, from Bactria, from India—­girls for whom I burn.”

Lucian vies with Anacreon when he makes Theomestus (Dial.  Amor.) exclaim:  “Sooner can’st thou number the waves of the sea and the snowflakes falling from the sky than my loves.  One succeeds another, and the new one comes on before the old is off.”  We call such a thing libertinism, not love.  The Greeks had not the name of Don Juan, yet Don Juan was their ideal both for men and for the gods they made in the image of man.  Homer makes the king of gods tell his own spouse (who listens without offence) of his diverse love-affairs (Iliad, xiv., 317-327).  Thirteen centuries after Homer the Greek poet Nonnus gives ([Greek:  Dionusiaka], vii.) a catalogue of twelve of Zeus’s amours; and we know from other sources (e.g., Hygin, fab., 155) that these accounts are far from exhaustive.  A complete list would match that yard-long document made for Don Juan by Leporello in Mozart’s opera.  A French writer has aptly called Jupiter the “Olympian Don Juan;” yet Apollo and most of the other gods might lay claim to the same title, for they are represented as equally amorous, sensual, and fickle; seeing no more wrong in deserting a woman they have made love to, than a bee sees in leaving a flower whose honey it has stolen.

Temporarily, of course, both men and gods focus their interest on one woman—­maybe quite ardently—­and fiercely resent interference, as an angry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it has accidentally chosen; but that is a different thing from the monopolism of true love.

ROMANTIC STORIES OF NON-ROMANTIC LOVE

The romantic lover’s dream is to marry one particular woman and her alone; the sensual lover’s dream embraces several women, or many.  The unromantic ideal of the ancient Hindoo is romantically illustrated in a story told in the Hitopadesa of a Brahman named Wedasarman.  One evening someone made him a present of a dish of barley-meal.  He carried it to the market hall and lay down in a corner near where a potter had stored his wares.  Before going to sleep, the Brahman indulged in these pleasant reveries: