his plays, gave vent to his
indignation at this new departure, but the tendency continued in the
New Comedy (Menander and others), which gave up the everlasting
Homeric heroes and introduced everyday contemporary scenes and people.
Thus the soil was prepared for the Alexandrians, but it was with them
that the new plant reached its full growth. Not content with following
the example of the New Comedy, they took up the Homeric personages
again, gods as well as heroes, but in a very different fashion from
that of their predecessors, proceeding to sentimentalize them to their
hearts' content, the gods being represented as sharing all the amorous
weaknesses of mortals, differing from them only, as Rohde remarks
(107), in being even more fickle than they, eternally changing their
loves.

The infusion of this romantic spirit into the dry old myths
undoubtedly brings the poems and stories of the Alexandrians and their
imitators a step nearer to modern conditions. The poets of the
Alexandrian period must also be credited with being the first who made
love (sensual love, I mean)--which had played so subordinate a role in
the old epics and tragedies--the central feature of interest, thus
setting a fashion which has continued without interruption to the
present day. As Couat puts it, with the pardonable exaggeration of a
specialist (155): "Les Alexandrins n'ont pas invente l'amour dans la
litterature ... mais ils ont cree la litterature de l'amour." Their
way of treating love was followed in detail by the Roman poets,
especially Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and by the Greek
novelists, Xenophon Ephesius, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Chariton,
Longus, etc., up to the fourth or fifth centuries (dates are
uncertain) of our era.

There is a "suprising similarity" in the descriptions of love-affairs
by all these writers, as is noted by Rohde, who devotes twenty pages
(145-165, chiefly foot-notes, after the fashion of German professors)
to detailed proof of his assertion. The substance of these pages, may,
however be summed up very briefly, under seventeen heads. In all these
writings, if the girl is represented as being respectable, (1) the
lovers meet or see each other for the first time at religious
festivals, as those were practically the only occasions where such
women could appear in public. (2) The love is sudden, at first sight,
no other being possible under circumstances that permit of no
prolonged courtship. (3)