So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modern love has been in vain.  At the same time it is obvious that since coyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been in the past of use to women, else it would not have survived and increased.  The question is:  how far down in the scale of civilization do we find traces of it?  The literature of the ancient Greeks indicates that, in a certain phase and among certain classes, it was known to them.  True, the respectable women, being always locked up and having no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasion for the exercise of any sort of coyness.  But the hetairai appear to have understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference in making a coveted man more eager in his wooing.  In the fifteenth of Lucian’s [Greek:  Etairikoi dialogoi] we read about a wanton who locked her door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talents for the privilege of exclusive possession.  In other cases, the poets still feel called upon to teach these women how to make men submissive by withholding caresses from them.  Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims: 

“To tell the truth, dear Joessa, you yourself spoiled him with your excessive love, which you even allowed him to notice.  You should not have made so much of him:  men, when they discover that, easily become overweening.  Do not weep, poor girl!  Follow my advice and keep your door locked once or twice when he tries to see you again.  You will find that that will make him flame up again and become frantic with love and jealousy.”

In the third book of his treatise on the Art of Love, Ovid advises women (of the same class) how to win men.  He says, in substance: 

“Do not answer his letters too soon; all delay inflames the lover, provided it does not last too long....  What is too readily granted does not long retain love.  Mix with the pleasure you give mortifying refusals, make him wait in your doorway; let him bewail the ’cruel door;’ let him beg humbly, or else get angry and threaten.  Sweet things cloy, tonics are bitter.”

MODESTY AND COYNESS

Feigned unwillingness or indifference in obedience to such advice may perhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase of that attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true modern coyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to conceal affection.  The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may be found as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes (Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses.  Of the Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, Mariner says (Martin, II., 174):