It is not only on account of this coarseness that the story of Theagenes and Chariclea fails to come up to the standard of romantic love.  When Arsace (VIII., 9) imprisons the lovers together, with the idea that the sight of their chains will increase the sufferings of each, we have an intimation of crude sympathy; but apart from that the symptoms of love referred to in the course of the romance are the same that I have previously enumerated, as peculiar to Alexandrian literature.  The maxims, “dread the revenge that follows neglected love;” “love soon finds its end in satiety;” and “the greatest happiness is to be free from love,” take us back to the oldest Greek times.  Peculiarly Greek, too, is the scene in which the women, unable to restrain their feelings, fling fruits and flowers at a young man because he is so beautiful; although on the same page we are surprised by the admission that woman’s beauty is even more alluring than man’s, which is not a Greek sentiment.

In this last respect, as in some others, the romance of Heliodorus differs favorably from that of Achilles Tatius, which relates the adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon; but I need not dwell on this amazingly obscene and licentious narrative, as its author’s whole philosophy of love, like that of Heliodorus, is summed up in this passage: 

“As the wine produced its effect I cast lawless glances at Leucippe:  for Love and Bacchus are violent gods, they invade the soul and so inflame it that they forget modesty, and while one kindles the flame the other supplies the fuel; for wine is the food of love.”

Nor need I dwell on the stories of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, or the epic Dionysiaca of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points of view.  The romance of Longus, however, calls for some remarks, as it is the best known of the Greek novels and has often been pronounced a story of refined love worthy of a modern writer.

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

Goethe found in Daphnis and Chloe “a delicacy of feeling which cannot be excelled.”  Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus:  “It needs an unintelligent reader or a morbid translator,” he writes (403), “to find harm in the History of Daphnis and Chloe;” and an editorial writer in the New York Mail and Express accused me, as before intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that Daphnis and Chloe is “as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose.”  This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion.  How it ever arose is a mystery to me.  Fiction has always been the sphere of the most unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his History of Fiction that there are in this story “particular passages so extremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost any work whatever.”  In collecting the material for the present volume I have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring