But the most serious oversight of the champions of Greek love is that they regard love as merely an emotion, or group of emotions, whereas, as I have shown, its most essential ingredients and only safe criteria are the altruistic impulses of gallantry and self-sacrifice, allied with sympathy and affection.  That there was no gallantry and self-sacrifice in Greek love of women I have already indicated (188, 197, 203, 163); and that there was no sympathy in it is obvious from the heartless way in which the men treated the women—­in life I mean, not merely in literature—­refusing to allow them the least liberty of movement, or choice in marriage, or to give them an education which would have enabled them to enjoy the higher pleasures of life on their own account.  As for affection, it is needless to add that it cannot exist where there is no sympathy, no gallant kindness and courtesy, and no willingness to sacrifice one’s selfish comfort or pleasures for another.

Of course we know all these things only on the testimony of Greek literature; but it would surely be the most extraordinary thing in the world if these altruistic impulses had existed in Greek life, and Greek literature had persistently and absolutely ignored them, while on the other hand it is constantly harping on the other ingredients of love which also accompany lust.  If literature has any historic value at all, if we can ever regard it as a mirror of life, we are entitled to the inference that romantic love was unknown to the Greeks of Europe, whereas the caresses and refinements and ardent longings of sensual love—­including hyperbole and the mixed moods of hope and despair—–­were familiar to them and are often expressed by them in poetic language (see 137, 140-44, 295, 299).  I say the Greeks of Europe, to distinguish them from those of Greater Greece, whose capacities for love we still have to consider.

GREEK LOVE IN AFRICA

It is amusing to note the difference of opinion prevailing among the champions of Greek love as to the time when it began to be sentimental and “modern.”  Some boldly go back to Homer, at the threshold of literature.  Many begin with Sappho, some with Sophocles, and a host with Euripides.  Menander is the starting-point to others, while Benecke has written a book to prove that the credit of inventing modern love belongs to Antimachus of Colophon.  The majority hesitate to go back farther than the Alexandrian school of the fourth century before Christ, while some modestly content themselves with the romancers of the fourth or fifth centuries after Christ—­thus allowing a latitude of twelve or thirteen hundred years to choose from.

We for our part, having applied our improved chemical test to such love as is recorded in the prose and verse of Classical Greece, and having found the elements of romantic sentiment missing, must now examine briefly what traces of it may occur in the much-vaunted erotic poems and stories of Greater Greece, notably the capital of Egypt in the third century before Christ.