Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/463

441 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 441 and Pericles much hi the same way as an old man weak in body, but full of a love of life, good humoured and self-indulgent, differs from the vigorous middle-aged man at the summit of his bodily strength and mental energy. The qualities which were before singularly united in the Athenian character, namely, resolute bravery and subtlety of inte'lect, were now entirely disjoined and separated. The former had taken up its abode with the homeless bands of mercenaries who practised war as a handicraft, and it was only on impulses of rare occurrence that the people of Athens gave way to a warlike enthusiasm which was speedily kindled and as spccdilv quenched. But the excellent understanding and mother- wit of the Athenians, so far as they did not ramble in the schools of the philosophers and rhetoricians, found an object (now that there was so little in politics which could interest or employ the mind) in the occurrences of social life, and in the charm of dissolute enjoyments. Dramatic poetry now for the first time centered in love* as it has since done anions; all nations to whom Greek cultivation has descended ; but certainly it was not love in those nobler forms to which it has since elevated itself. The seclusion and Avant of all society in which un- married women lived at Athens (such as we have before described it, in speaking of the poetry of Sappho)t continued to prevail unaltered in the families of the citizens of Athens ; according to these customs then, an amour of any continuance with the daughter of a citizen of Athens was out of the question, and never occurs in the fragments and imitations of the comedy of Menander ; if the plot of the piece depends on the seduction of an Athenian damsel, this has taken place suddenly and without premeditation, in a fit of drunkenness and youthful lust, generally at one of the pervigilia, which the religion of Athens had sanctioned from the earliest times : or some supposed slave or hetcera, with whom the hero is desperately in love, turns out to be a well-born Athenian maiden, and marriage at last crowns a connexion entered upon with very different intentions. J The intercourse of the young men with the heteerce or courtesans, an intercourse which had always been a reproach to them since the days of Aristophanes,^ had at length become a regular custom with the young people of the better class, whose fathers did not treat them too parsi- moniously. These courtesans, who were generally foreigners or freed- womcn,;j possessed more or less education and charms of manner, and in f Chap. XIII. § 0, + This is the .uo*rai) by their lovers, and so rise into the other more honour- able condition.
 * Fabula jueundi nulla est sin*' nmore Menandri. Ovid. Trist., II. 370.
 * This constitutes the essential distinction between the Irxiga and the -r'o^n,