[295] Which, however, evidently was not saying much, as he immediately added that he was ready to give her up provided they gave him another girl, lest he be the only one of the Greeks without a “prize of honor.”  Strong individual preference, as we shall see also in the case of Achilles, was not a trait of “heroic” Greek love.

[296] I have already commented (115) on Nausicaea’s lack of feminine delicacy and coyness; yet Gladstone says (132) “it may almost be questioned whether anywhere in literature there is to be found a conception of the maiden so perfect as Nausicaea in grace, tenderness, and delicacy”!

[297] How Gladstone reconciled his conscience with these lines when he wrote (112) that “on one important and characteristic subject, the exposure of the person to view, the men of that time had a peculiar and fastidious delicacy,” I cannot conceive.

[298] It will always remain one of the strangest riddles of the nineteenth century why the statesman who so often expressed his righteous indignation over the “Bulgarian atrocities” of his time should not only have pardoned, but with insidious and glaring sophistry apologized for the similar atrocities of the heroes whom Homer fancies he is complimenting when he calls them professional “spoilers of towns.”  I wish every reader of this volume who has any doubts regarding the correctness of my views would first read Gladstone’s shorter work on Homer (a charmingly written book, with all its faults), and then the epics themselves, which are now accessible to all in the admirable prose versions of the Iliad by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers, and of the Odyssey by Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard—­versions which are far more poetic than any translations in verse ever made and which make of these epics two of the most entertaining novels ever written.  It is from these versions that I have cited, except in a few cases where I preferred a more literal rendering of certain words.

[299] In all the extracts here made I follow the close literal prose version made by H.T.  Wharton, in his admirable book on Sappho, by far the best in the English language.

[300] P.B.  Jevons refers to some of these as “mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings!” Welcker’s defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of naivete written in ignorance of mental pathology.

[301] The most elaborate discussion of this subject is to be found in Moll’s Untersuchungen, 314-440, where also copious bibliographic references are given.  The most striking impression left by the reading of this book is that the differentiation of the sexes is by no means as complete yet as it ought to be.  All the more need is there of romantic love, whose function it is to assist and accelerate this differentiation.