ndeed a champion of morality, but there is no good reason
to suppose that, before he appeared, the rather stern Roman mind had yet
conceived those refinements and courtesies which he set forth in such
charming detail. If we take a wide survey of his work, we may perhaps
regard Ovid as the pioneer of a chivalrous attitude towards women and of
a romantic conception of love not only new in Rome but of significance
for Europe generally. Ovid was a powerful factor in the Renaissance
movement, and not least in England, where his influence on Shakespeare
and some others of the Elizabethans cannot easily be overrated.[69]

For the ordinary classic mind, Greek or Roman, marriage was intended for
the end of building up the family, and the family was consecrated to the
State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain
austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate
emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside
marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian
hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this
classic attitude may be said to persist even to-day among the so-called
Latin nations, notably in the French tradition (now dying out) of
treating marriage as a relationship to be arranged, not by the two
parties themselves, but by their parents and guardians; Montaigne,
attached as he was to maxims of Roman antiquity, was not very alien from
the ordinary French attitude of his time when he declared that, since we
do not marry so much for our own sakes as for the sake of posterity and
the race, marriage is too sacred a process to be mixed with amorous
extravagance.[70] There is something to be said for that point of view
which is nowadays too often forgotten, but it certainly fails to cover
the whole of the ground.

It is not only in the West that a contemptuous attitude towards the
romantic and erotic side of life has prevailed at some of the most
vigorous moments of civilization. It is also found in the East. In
Japan, for instance, even at the present day, romantic love, as a
reputable element of ordinary life, is unknown or disapproved; its
existence is not recognized in the schools, and the European novels that
celebrate it are scarcely understood.[71]

The development of modern romantic love in connection with marriage
seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire.[72]
That is commonly called a period of decad