It is in the Alexandrian period of Greek literature and art that, according to Helbig (194), “we first meet traits that suggest the adoration of women (Frauencultus) and gallantry.”  This opinion is widely prevalent, a special instance being that ecstatic exclamation of Professor Ebers:  “Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies?” In reality this act was inspired by selfish adulation and had not the remotest connection with love.

The story in brief is as follows:  Shortly after his marriage to Berenice, Ptolemy went on an expedition into Syria.  To insure his safe return to Egypt Berenice vowed to consecrate her beautiful hair to Venus.  On his return she fulfilled her vow in the temple; but on the following day her hair could not be found.  To console the king and the queen, and to conciliate the royal favor, the astronomer Conon declared that the locks of Berenice had been removed by divine interposition and transferred to the skies in the form of a constellation.[315]

A still more amusing instance of Alexandrian “gallantry” is to be found in the case of the queen Stratonice, whose court-poets were called upon to compete with each other in singing of the beauty of her locks.  The fact that she was bald, did not, as a matter of course, make the slightest difference in this kind of homage.

Unlike his colleagues, Rohde was not misled into accepting such adulation of queens as evidence of adoration of women in general.  In several pages of admirable erudition (63-69), which I commend to all students of the subject, he exposes the hollowness and artificiality of this so-called Alexandrian chivalry.  Fashion ordained that poems should be addressed to women of exalted rank: 

“As the queens were, like the kings, enrolled among the gods, the court-poets, of course, were not allowed to neglect the praise of the queens, and they were called upon to celebrate the royal weddings;[316] nay, in the extravagance of their gallant homage they rose to a level of bad taste the pinnacle of which was reached by Callimachus in his elegy—­so well-known through the imitation of Catullus—­on the hair of queen Berenice placed among the constellations by the courtesy of the astronomer Conon.”

He then proceeds to explain that we must be careful not to infer from such a courtly custom that other women enjoyed the freedom and influence of the queen or shared their compliments.

“In actual life a certain chivalrous attitude toward women existed at most toward hetairai, in which case, as a matter of course, it was adulterated with a very unpleasant ingredient of frivolous sentimentality....  Of an essential change in the position of respectable girls and women there is no indication.”

Though there were a number of learned viragoes, there