Having just mentioned Benecke, I may as well add here that his own theory regarding the first appearance of the romantic elements in Greek love-poetry rests on an equally flimsy basis.  He held that Antimachus, who flourished before Euripides and Plato had passed away, was the first poet who applied to women the idea of a pure, chivalrous love, which up to his time had been attributed only to the romantic friendships with boys.  The “romantic idea,” according to Benecke, is “the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man’s love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man’s life.”  But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke’s imagination.  The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife—­a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon—­and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek:  Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales.  Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love to be.

[318] Theocritus makes this point clear in line 5 of Idyl 12: 

     [Greek:  hosson parthenikae propherei trigamoio gunaikos].

[319] See Helbig, 246, and Rohde, 36, for details.  Helbig remarks that the Alexandrians, following the procedure of Euripides, chose by preference incestuous passions, “and it appears that such passions were not rare in actual life too in those times.”

[320] He refers as instances to Plaut., Asin., III., 3, particularly v. 608 ff. and 615; adding that “a very sentimental character is Charinus in the Mercator;” and he also points to Ter., Eun., 193 ff.

[321] What makes this evidence the more conclusive is that Rohde’s use of the word “sentimental” refers, according to his own definition, to egoistic sentimentality, not to altruistic sentiment.  Of sentimentality—­altiloquent, fabricated feeling and cajolery—­there is enough in Greek and Latin literature, doubtless as a reflection of life.  But when, in the third act of the Asinaria, the lover says to his girl, “If I were to hear that you were in want of life, at once would I present you my own life and from my own would add to yours,” we promptly ask, “Would he have done it?” And the answer, from all we know of these men and their attitude toward women, would have been the same as that of the maiden to the enamoured Daphnis, in the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus:  “Now you promise me everything, but afterward you will not give me a pinch of salt.”  As for the purity of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a procuress.  From the point of view of purity the Captivi is particularly instructive.  Riley calls it “the most pure and innocent of all the plays of Plautus;”