“From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises.  Here still grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told.  For being at her wit’s ends and finding no ease from the pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves of this myrtle.”

Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic literature, writes (34): 

“It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which Euripides followed, in what might be called his tragedies of adultery, that they always make the woman the vehicle of the pernicious passion; it seems as if Greek feeling could not conceive of a man being seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to passionate disregard of all human conventions and laws.”

MASCULINE COYNESS

Greek poets from Stesichorus to the Alexandrians are fond of representing coy men.  The story told by Athenaeus (XIV., ch. 11) of Harpalyke, who committed suicide because the youth Iphiclus coyly spurned her, is typical of a large class.  No less significant is the circumstance that when the coy backwardness happens to be on the side of a female, she is usually a woman of masculine habits, devoted to Diana and the chase.  Several centuries after Christ we still find in the romances an echo of this thoroughly Greek sentiment in the coy attitude, at the beginning, of their youthful heroes.[20]

The well-known legend of Sappho—­who flourished about a thousand years before the romances just referred to were written—­is quite in the Greek spirit.  It is thus related by Strabo: 

“There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and toward Cephalonia, that takes its name from its whiteness.  The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was supposed to stop love.  From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king.”

Four centuries after Sappho we find Theocritus harping on the same theme.  His Enchantress is a monologue in which a woman relates how she made advances to a youth and won him.  She saw him walking along the road and was so smitten that she was prostrated and confined to her bed for ten days.  Then she sent her slave to waylay the youth, with these instructions:  “If you see him alone, say to him:  ’Simaitha desires you,’ and bring him here.”  In this case the youth is not coy in the least; but the sequel of the story is too bucolic to be told here.

SHY BUT NOT COY

It is well-known that the respectable women of Greece, especially the virgins, were practically kept under lock and key in the part of the house known as the gynaikonitis.  This resulted in making them shy and bashful—­but not coy, if we may judge from the mirror of life known as literature.  Ramdohr observes, pertinently (III., 270):