erward you will not give me a pinch of salt." As for the purity
of the characters in the play, its quality may be inferred from the
fact that the girl is not only a hetaira, but the daughter of a
procuress. From the point of view of purity the _Captivi_ is
particularly instructive. Riley calls it "the most pure and innocent
of all the plays of Plautus;" and when we examine why this is so we
find that it is because there is no woman in it! In the epilogue
Plautus himself--who made his living by translating Athenian comedies
into Latin--makes the significant confession that there were but few
Greek plays from which he might have copied so chaste a plot, in which
"there is no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child" to be
found by a procuress and brought up as a hetaira--which are the staple
features of these later Greek plays.

[322] Those who cannot read Greek will derive much pleasure from the
admirable prose version of Andrew Lang, which in charm of style
sometimes excels the original, while it veils those features that too
much offend modern taste.

[323] Couat, 142. There are reasons to believe that the epistles
referred to are not by Ovid. Aristaenetus lived about the fifth
century. It is odd that the poem of Callimachus should have been lost
after surviving eight centuries.

[324] See also Helbig's Chap. XXII. on the increasing lubricity of
Greek art.

[325] Space permitting, it would be interesting to examine these poets
in detail, as well as the other Romans--Virgil, Horace, Lucretius,
etc., who came less under Greek influence. But in truth such
examination would be superfluous. Any one may pursue the investigation
by himself, and if he will bear in mind and apply as tests, the last
seven of my ingredients of love--the altruistic-supersensual group--he
cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I
have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in
Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel
doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot
have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries.
It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred
and practical, and so much less emotional and esthetic, than the
Greeks, should have excelled them in the capacity for what is one of
the most esthetic and the most imaginative of all sentiments.

Before leaving the poets, I may add that the G