and when we examine why this is so we find that it is because there is no woman in it!  In the epilogue Plautus himself—­who made his living by translating Athenian comedies into Latin—­makes the significant confession that there were but few Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which “there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child” to be found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira—­which are the staple features of these later Greek plays.

[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too much offend modern taste.

[323] Couat, 142.  There are reasons to believe that the epistles referred to are not by Ovid.  Aristaenetus lived about the fifth century.  It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost after surviving eight centuries.

[324] See also Helbig’s Chap.  XXII. on the increasing lubricity of Greek art.

[325] Space permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets in detail, as well as the other Romans—­Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, etc., who came less under Greek influence.  But in truth such examination would be superfluous.  Any one may pursue the investigation by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last seven of my ingredients of love—­the altruistic-supersensual group—­he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek.  And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries.  It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the Greeks, should have excelled them in the capacity for what is one of the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sentiments.

Before leaving the poets, I may add that the Greek Anthology, the basis of which was laid by Meleager, a contemporary of the Roman poets just referred to, contains a collection of short poems by many Greek writers, in which, of course, some of my critics have discovered romantic love.  One of them wrote that “the poems of Meleager alone in the Greek Anthology would suffice to refute the notion that Greece ignored romantic passion.”  If this critic will take the trouble to read these poems of Meleager in the original he will find that a disgustingly large number relate to [Greek:  paiderastia], which in No.  III. is expressly declared to be superior to the love for women; that most of the others relate to hetairai; and that not one of them—­or one in the whole Anthology—­comes up to my standard of romantic love.