all the ancient poets of love," is
obliged to admit that he "has not the romance and purity of modern
sentiment" (349, 22). Like the Greeks, he had a vague idea that there
is something higher than sensual passion, but, like a Greek, in
expressing it, he ignores women as a matter of course. "There was a
time," he writes to his profligate Lesbia, "when I loved you not as a
man loves his mistress, but _as a father loves his son or his
son-in-law_"!

Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,
Lesbia, nee prae me velle tenere Iovem.
Dilexi tum te non ut volgus amicam,
Sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos.

In Tibullus there is a note of tenderness which, however, is a mark of
effeminacy rather than of an improved manliness. His passion is
fickle, his adoration little more than adulation, and the expressions
of unselfish devotion here and there do not mean more than the
altiloquent words of Achilles about Briseis or of Admetus about
Alcestis, for they are not backed up by altruistic actions. In a word,
his poems belong to the region of sentimentality, not sentiment.
Morally he is as rotten as any of his colleagues. He began his poetic
career with a glorification of [Greek: paiderastia], and continued it
as an admirer of the most abandoned women. A French author who wrote a
history of prostitution in three volumes quite properly devoted a
chapter to Tibullus and his love-affairs.[325]

SHORT STORIES

A big volume might be filled with the short love-stories in prose or
verse scattered through a thousand years of Greek literature. But,
although some of them are quite romantic, I must emphatically
reiterate what I said in my first book (76)--that romantic love does
not appear in the writings of any Greek author and that the passion of
the desperately enamoured young people so often portrayed sprang
entirely from sensuality. One of the critics referred to at the
beginning of this chapter held me up to the ridicule of the British
public because I ignored such romantic love-stories as Orpheus and
Eurydice, Alcyone and Ceyx, Atalanta and Meleager, Cephalus and
Procris, and "a dozen others" which "any school girl" could tell me.
To begin with the one last named, the critic asks: "What can be said
against Cephalus and Procris?" A great deal, I am afraid. As told by
Antoninus Liberalis in No. 41 of his _Metamorphoses_ ([Greek:
metamorphoseon synagogae]) it is one of the most abominable and
obscene stories e