Of the symptoms of love in Medea’s heart described in the foregoing paragraph not one rises above that egotistic gloating over the pangs and joys of sensual infatuation which constitute one phase of sentimentality; while the further progress of the story shows that Medea had no idea whatever of sacrificing herself for Jason, but that the one motive of her actions was the eager desire to possess him.  When the fugitives are being pursued closely, and the chivalrous Argonauts, afraid to battle with a superior number, propose to retain the Golden Fleece, but to give up Medea and let some other king decide whether she is to be returned to her parents, it never occurs to her that she might save her beloved by going back home.  She wants to have him at any cost, or to perish with him; so she reproaches him bitterly for his ingratitude, and meditates the plan of setting fire to the ships and burning him up with all the crew, as well as herself.  He tries to pacify her by protesting that he had not quite liked the plan proposed himself, but had indorsed it only to gain time; whereupon she suggests a way out of the dilemma pleasanter to herself, by advising the Argonauts to inveigle her brother, who leads the pursuers, into their power and assassinate him; which they promptly proceed to do, while she stands by with averted eyes.  It is with unconscious sarcasm that Apollonius exclaims on the same page where all these details of “romantic love on the higher side” are being unfolded:  “Accursed Eros, the world’s most direful plague.”

POETS AND HETAIRAI.

The one commendable feature which the stories of Acontius and Cydippe and of Medea and Jason have in common is that the heroine in each case is a respectable and pure maiden (see Argon., IV., 1018-1025).  But, although the later romance writers followed this example, it would be a great mistake to suppose, with Mahaffy (272), that this touch of virgin purity was felt by the Alexandrians to be “the necessary starting-point of the love-romance in a refined society.”  Alexandrian society was anything but refined in matters of love, and the trait referred to stands out by reason of its novelty and isolation in a literature devoted chiefly to the hetairai.  We see this especially also in the epigrams of the period.  It is astonishing, writes Couat (173), how many of these are erotic; and “almost all,” he adds, “are addressed to courtesans or young boys.”  “Dans toutes l’auteur ne chante que la beaute plastique et les plaisirs faciles; leur Cypris est la Cypris [Greek:  pandaemos], celle qui se vend a tout le monde.”  In these verses of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Poseidippus and others, he finds sentimentality but no sentiment; and on page 62 he sums up Alexandria with French patness as a place “ou l’on faisait assidument des vers sur l’amour sans etre amoureux”—­“where they were ever writing love-poems without ever being in love.”  But what repels modern taste