SHELLEY ON GREEK LOVE

It is possible that Hegel may have read this book, for it appeared in 1798, while the first manuscript sketches of his lectures on esthetics bear the date of 1818.  He may have also read Robert Wood’s book entitled An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, dated 1775, in which this sentence occurs: 

“Is it not very remarkable, that Homer, so great a master of the tender and pathetic, who has exhibited human nature in almost every shape, and under every view, has not given a single instance of the powers and effects of love, distinct from sensual enjoyment, in the Iliad?”

This is as far as I have been able to trace back this notion in modern literature.  But in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century I have come across several adumbrations of the truth regarding the Greeks,[3] by Shelley, Lord Lytton, Lord Macaulay, and Theophile Gautier.  Shelley’s ideas are confused and contradictory, but interesting as showing the conflict between traditional opinion and poetic intuition.  In his fragmentary discourse on “The Manners of the Ancients Relating to the Subject of Love,” which was intended to serve as an introduction to Plato’s Symposium, he remarks that the women of the ancient Greeks, with rare exceptions, possessed

“the habits and the qualities of slaves.  They were probably not extremely beautiful, at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions of the external form between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as exists among the modern Europeans.  They were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit.  Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths.”  Having painted this life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on to say perversely: 

“Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its legitimate object, that they were incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern times.”

He tries to justify this assertion by adding that

“Man is in his wildest state a social being:  a certain degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connection.  It soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative,