The pictures of the utter degradation of the most famous of the hetairai—­Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by Athenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages.  Combined with the revelations made in Lucian’s [Greek:  Etairikoi dialogoi], they demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of the men, even if the latter had been capable of it.

It is to such vulgar persons that the poets of classical Greece and Alexandria addressed their verses.  And herein they were followed by those of the Latins who may be regarded as imitators of the Alexandrians—­Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the principal erotic poets of Rome.  They wrote all their love-poems to, for, or about, a class of women corresponding to the Greek hetairai.  Of Ovid I have already spoken (189), and what I said of him practically applies to the others.  Propertius not only writes with the hetairai in his mind, but, like his Alexandrian models, he appears as one who is forever writing love-poems without ever being really in love.  With Catullus the sensual passion at least is sincere.  Yet even Professor Sellar, who declares that he is, “with the exception perhaps of Sappho, the greatest and truest of all the ancient poets of love,” is obliged to admit that he “has not the romance and purity of modern sentiment” (349, 22).  Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course.  “There was a time,” he writes to his profligate Lesbia, “when I loved you not as a man loves his mistress, but as a father loves his son or his son-in-law”!

     Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,
     Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem. 
     Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam,
     Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark of effeminacy rather than of an improved manliness.  His passion is fickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressions of unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than the altiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus about Alcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions.  In a word, his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment.  Morally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues.  He began his poetic career with a glorification of [Greek:  paiderastia], and continued it as an admirer of the most abandoned women.  A French author who wrote a history of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted a chapter to Tibullus and his love-affairs.[325]

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