It is true that of the principal poets of the Alexandrian school—­Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius—­only the last named was probably a native of Alexandria; but the others made it their home and sphere of influence, being attracted by the great library, which contained all the treasures of Greek literature, and other inducements which the Ptolemies held out to men of letters.  Thus it is permissible to speak of an African or Alexandrian period of Greek literature, all the more as the cosmopolitan influences at work at Alexandria gave this literature a peculiar character of its own, erotically as well as otherwise, which tinged Greek writings from that time on.

In reading Homer we are struck by the utter absence not only of stories of romantic love but of romantic love-stories.  Even the relations of Achilles and Briseis, which offered such fine romantic opportunities, are treated in an amazingly prosaic manner.  An emphatic change in this respect is hardly to be noted till we come to Euripides, who, though ignorant of romantic love, gave women and their feelings more attention than they had previously received in literature.  Aristophanes, in several of his plays, gave vent to his indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlasting Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.  Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them that the new plant reached its full growth.  Not content with following the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages again, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion from that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their hearts’ content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorous weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks (107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their loves.

The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths undoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and their imitators a step nearer to modern conditions.  The poets of the Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who made love (sensual love, I mean)—­which had played so subordinate a role in the old epics and tragedies—­the central feature of interest, thus setting a fashion which has continued without interruption to the present day.  As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of a specialist (155):  “Les Alexandrins n’ont pas invente l’amour dans la litterature ... mais ils ont cree la litterature de l’amour.”  Their way of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets, especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek novelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton, Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are uncertain) of our era.