[317] I have given Professor Rohde’s testimony on this point not only because he is a famous specialist in the literature of this period, but because his peculiar bias makes his negative attitude in regard to the question of Alexandrian gallantry the more convincing.  A reader of his book would naturally expect him to take the opposite view, since he himself fancied he had discovered traces of gallantry in an author who preceded the Alexandrians.  The Andromeda of Euripides, he declares (23), “became in his hands one of the most brilliant examples of chivalrous love.”  This, however, is a pure assumption on his part, not warranted by the few fragments of this play that have been preserved.  Benecke has devoted a special “Excursus” to this play (203-205), in which he justly remarks that readers of Greek literature “need hardly be reminded of how utterly foreign to the Greek of Euripides’s day is the conception of the ‘galante Ritter’ setting out in search of ladies that want rescuing.”  He might have brought out the humor of the matter by quoting the characteristically Greek version of the Perseus story given by Apollodorus, who relates dryly (II., chap. 4) that Cepheus, in obedience to an oracle, bound his daughter to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster.  “Perseus saw her, fell in love with her, and promised Cepheus to slaughter the monster if he would promise to give him the rescued daughter to marry.  The contract was made and Perseus undertook the adventure, killed the monster and rescued Andromeda.”  Nothing could more strikingly reveal the difference between Hellenic and modern ideas regarding lovers than the fact that to the Greek mind there was nothing disgraceful in this selfish, ungallant bargain made by Perseus as a condition of his rescuing the poor girl from a horrible death.  A mediaeval knight, or a modern gentleman, not to speak of a modern lover, would have saved her at the risk of his own life, reward or no reward.  The difference is further emphasized by the attitude of the girl, who exclaims to her deliverer, “Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden, or wife, or slave.”  Professor Murray, who cites this line in his History of Greek Literature, remarks with comic naivete:  “The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before.”  But what is there so remarkably “pure and happy” in a girl’s offering herself as a slave to a man who has saved her life?  Were not Greek women always expected to assume that attitude of inferiority, submission, and self-sacrifice?  Was not Alcestis written to enforce that principle of conduct?  And does not that very exclamation of Andromeda show how utterly antipodal the situation and the whole drama of Euripides were to modern ideas of chivalrous love?