Professor Gercke has well remarked (141) that the charm of elegance with which Menander covers up his moral rottenness, and which made him the favorite of the jeunesse doree of his time, exerted a bad influence on the stage through many centuries.  There are a few quasi-altruistic expressions in the plays of Terence and Plautus, but they are not supported by actions and do not reach beyond the sphere of sentimentality into that of sentiment.  Here again I may adduce Rohde as an unbiassed witness.  While declaring that there is “a longing for the ennobling of the passion in actual life” he admits that

“really sentimental effusions of love are strikingly rare in Plautus and Terence.[320] One might think the authors of the Latin versions had omitted the sentimental passages, were it not that in the remnants of the Newer Comedy of the Attic writers themselves there are, apart from general references to Eros, no traces whatever of sentimental allusions."[321]

THEOCRITUS AND CALLIMACHUS

Let us now return from Athens and Rome to Alexandria, to see whether we can find a purer and more genuinely romantic atmosphere in the works of her leading poets.  Of these the first in time and fame is Theocritus.  He, like Sappho, has been lauded as a poet of love; and he does resemble Sappho in two respects.  Like her, he often glorifies unnatural passion in a way which, as in the twelfth and twenty-third Idyls, for example, tempts every normal person who can read the original to throw the whole book away in disgust.  Like Sappho and the Hindoos (and some modern Critics) he also seems to imagine that the chief symptoms of love are emaciation, perspiration, and paralysis, as we see in the absurdly overrated second Idyl, of which I have already spoken (116).  Lines 87-88 of Idyl I., lines 139-142 of Idyl II., and the whole of Idyl XXVII., practically sum up the conception of love prevailing in the bucolic school of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, except that Theocritus has an idea of the value of coyness and jealousy as stimulants of passion, as Idyl VI. shows.  Crude coyness and rude jealousy no doubt were known also to the rustic folk he sings about; but when he makes that ugly, clumsy, one-eyed monster, the Cyclops Polyphemus, fall in love with the sea-nymph Galatea (Idyl XI.) and lament that he was not born with fins that he might dive and kiss her hand if his lips she refused, he applies Alexandrian pseudo-gallantry to pastoral conditions where they are ludicrously out of place.  The kind of “gallantry” really to be expected under these conditions is realistically indicated in Idyl XIV., where Aeschines, after declaring that he shall go mad some day because the beautiful Cyniska flouted him, tells his friend how, in a fit of jealousy, he had struck the girl on the cheek twice with clenched fist, while she was sitting at his own table.  Thereupon she left him, and now he laments:  “If I could only find a cure for my love!”