[314] Professor Rohde appears to follow the old metaphysical maxim “If facts do not agree with my theory, so much the worse for the facts.”  He piles up pages of evidence which show conclusively that these Greeks knew nothing of the higher traits and symptoms of love, and then he adds:  “but they must have known them all the same.”  To give one instance of his contradictory procedure.  On page 70 he admits that, as women were situated, the tender and passionate courtship of the youths as described in poems and romances of the period “could hardly have been copied from life,” because the Greek custom of allowing the fathers to dispose of their daughters without consulting their wishes was incompatible with the poetry of such courting.  “It is very significant,” he adds, “that among the numerous references to the ways of obtaining brides made by poets and moral philosophers, including those of the Hellenistic [Alexandrian] period, and collected by Stobaeus in chapters 70, 71, and 72 of his Florilegium, love is never mentioned among the motives of marriage choice.”  In the next sentence he declares nevertheless that “no one would be so foolish as to deny the existence of pure, strong love in the Greek life of this period;” and ten lines farther on he backs down again, admitting that though there may be indications of supersensual, sentimental love in the literature of this period these traits had not yet taken hold of the life of these men, though there were longings for them.  And at the end of the paragraph he emphasizes his back-down by declaring that “the very essence of sentimental poetry is the longing for what does not exist.” (Ist doch das rechte Element gerade der sentimentalen Poesie die Sehnsucht nach dem nicht Vorhandenen.) What makes this admission the more significant is that Professor Rohde, in speaking of “sentimental” elements, does not even use that word as the adjective of sentiment but of sentimentality.  He defines this Sentimentalitaet to which he refers as a “_ Sehnen, Sinnen und Hoffen_,” a “Selbstgenuss der Leidenschaft”—­a “longing, dreaming, and hoping,” a “revelling in (literally, self-enjoying of) passion.”  In other words, an enjoyment of emotion for emotion’s sake, a gloating over one’s selfish joys and sorrows.  Now in this respect I actually go beyond Rohde as a champion of Greek love!  Such Sentimentalitaet existed, I am convinced, in Alexandrian life as well as in Alexandrian literature; but of the existence of true supersensual altruistic sentiment I can find no evidence.  The trouble with Rohde, as with so many who have written on this subject, is that he has no clear idea of the distinction between sensual love, which is selfish (Selbstgenuss) and romantic love, which is altruistic; hence he flounders in hopeless contradictions.

[315] See Anthon, 258, and the authors there referred to.

[316] See Theocritus, Idyll XVII.  Regarding the silly and degrading adulation which the Alexandrian court-poets were called upon to bestow on the kings and queens, and its demoralizing effect on literature, see also Christ’s Griechische Litteraturgeschichte, 493-494 and 507.