There is a “suprising similarity” in the descriptions of love-affairs by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages (145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fashion of German professors) to detailed proof of his assertion.  The substance of these pages, may, however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads.  In all these writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious festivals, as those were practically the only occasions where such women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight, no other being possible under circumstances that permit of no prolonged courtship. (3) The youth is represented as having previously felt a coy, proud aversion to the goddess of love, who now avenges herself by smiting him with a violent, maddening passion. (4) The love is mutual, and it finds its way to the heart through the eyes. (5) Cupid with his arrows, urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the maiden are extraordinarily beautiful.  No attempt is made, however, to describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the Oriental and the later Byzantine authors.  Hyperbole is used in comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures and statues—­a characteristically Greek device, going back as far as Hesiod and Homer. (7) The passion of the lovers is a genuine disease, which (8) monopolizes their souls, and (9) makes them neglect the care of the body, (10) makes pallor alternate with blushes, (11) deprives them of sleep, or fills their dreams with the beloved; (12) it urges them to seek solitude, and (13) to tell their woes to the trees and rocks, which (14) are supposed to sympathize with them. (15) The passion is incurable, even wine, the remedy for other cares, serving only to aggravate it. (16) Like Orientals, the lovers may swoon away or fall into dangerous illness. (17) The lover cuts the beloved’s name into trees, follows her footsteps, consults the flower oracle, wishes he were a bee so he could fly to her, and at the banquet puts his lips to the spot where she drank from the cup.

Having finished his list of erotic traits, Rohde confesses frankly that it “embraces, to be sure, only a limited number of the simplest symptoms of love.”  But instead of drawing therefrom the obvious inference that love which has no other symptoms than those is very far from being like modern love, he adds perversely and illogically that “in its essential traits, this passion is presumably the same at all times and with all nations."[314]

ALEXANDRIAN CHIVALRY.