Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) in which Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear to him as his goats.  In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal of Sicilian pastoral love; nor is there a line which indicates that Theocritus himself knew any higher phases of love than those which he embodies in his shepherds.  In a writer who has so many poetic charms[322] this may seem strange, but it simply bears out my theory that romantic love is one of the latest products of civilization—­as late as the love of romantic scenery, which we do not find in Theocritus, though he writes charmingly of other kinds of scenery—­of cool fountains, shady groves, pastures with cattle, apple trees, and other things that please the senses of man—­as women do while they are young and pretty.

Callimachus, the younger contemporary of Theocritus, is another Alexandrian whose importance in the history of love has been exaggerated.  His fame rests chiefly on the story of Acontius and Cydippe which occurred in the collection of legends and tales he had brought together in his [Greek:  Aitia].  His own version is now lost, like most of his other works; and such fragments of the story as remain would not suffice for the purpose of reconstruction were we not aided by the two epistles which the lovers exchange with each other in the Heroides of Ovid, and more still by the prose version of Aristaenetus, which appears to be quite literal, judging by the correspondence of the text with some of the extant fragments of the original.[323] The story can be related in a few lines.  Acontius and Cydippe are both very beautiful and have both been coy to others of the opposite sex.  As a punishment they are made to fall in love with each other at first sight in the Temple of Diana.  It is a law of this temple that any vow made in it must be kept.  To secure the girl, Acontius therefore takes an apple, writes on it a vow that she will be his bride and throws it at her feet.  She picks it up, reads the vow aloud and thus pledges herself.  Her parents, some time after, want to marry her to another man; three times the wedding arrangements are made, but each time she falls ill.  Finally the oracle at Delphi is consulted, which declares that the girl’s illness is due to her not keeping her vow; whereupon explanations follow and the lovers are united.

In the literary history of love this story may be allowed a conspicuous place for the reason that, as Mahaffy remarks (G.L. & T., 230), it is the first literary original of that sort of tale which makes falling in love and happy marriage the beginning and the end, while the obstacles to this union form the details of the plot.  Moreover, as Couat points out (145), the later Greek romances are mere imitations of this Alexandrian elegy—­Hero and Leander, Leucippe and Clitophon, and other stories all recall it.  But from my point of view—­the evolutionary and psychological—­I cannot