Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern

“I know but one little thing,” said Socrates. “It is love.” Socrates was ironical. That which it pleased him to call little, Plato regarded as a special form of the universal law of attraction. His theories on the subject are contained in the Phædrus and the Symposion, two poetically luxurious works produced by him in the violet-crowned city during the brilliant Athenian day, before Socrates had gone and Sparta had come.

The Symposion is a banquet. A few friends, Phædrus and Pausanias, men of letters; Eryximachus, a physician; Aristophanes, the poet; Socrates, the seer, have been supping at the house of Agathon. By way of food for thought love is suggested. Discussion regarding it follows, in which Socrates joins – a simple expedient that enabled Plato to put in his master’s mouth the æsthetic nectar of personal views of which the real Socrates never dreamed.

Among the first disputants is Phædrus. In his quality of man of letters he began with extravagant praise of Eros, whom he called the mightiest of all gods, the chief minister of happiness.

To this, Pausanias, also a literary man and therefore indisposed to agree with another, objected. “Phædrus would be right,” he said, “if there were but one Eros. But there are two. Love is inseparable from Aphrodite. If there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one love. But there are two Aphrodites. Hence there must be two loves. One Aphrodite is Urania or celestial, the other Pandemos or common. The divinities should all be lauded. Still there is a distinction between these two. They vary as actions do. Consider what we are now doing, drinking and talking. These things in themselves are neither good nor evil. They become one or the other in accordance with the way in which we do them. In the same manner, not every love, but only that which is inherently altruistic, can be called divine. The love inspired by Aphrodite Pandemos is essentially common. It is such as appeals to vulgar natures. It is of the senses, not of the soul. Intemperate persons experience this love, which seeks only its own gross end. Whereas the love that comes of Aphrodite Urania has for object the happiness and improvement of another.”

With all of which Eryximachus agreed. Eryximachus was a physician, consequently more naturalistic, and in agreeing he extended the duality of love over all things, over plants and animals as well as over man, claiming for it a universal influence in nature, science, and the arts, expressing himself meanwhile substantially as follows:

In the human body there are two loves, confessedly different, as such their desires are unlike, the desire of the healthy body being one thing, that of the unhealthy something else. The skilful physician knows how to separate them, how to convert one into the other, and reconcile their hostile elements. In music there is the same reconciliation of opposites. This is demonstrable by rhythm, which is composed of elements short and long, and which, though differing, may be harmonized. The course of the seasons is also an example of both principles. When the opposing forces, sunlight and rain, heat and cold, blend harmoniously they bring fertility and health, precisely as their discord has a counter influence. The knowledge of love in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies is termed astronomy. Lastly, religion, through the knowledge which it has of what is pious and what is impious, is love’s intermediary between men and gods.

Such is love’s universal sway. The origin of its duality Aristophanes then explained. Sages, neighbors of the gods, of whom Empedocles was the last representative, had supposed, that in the beginning of things, those that loved were one. Later they were separated. Thereafter they sought the better half which they had lost. This tradition, possibly Orphic, Aristophanes took for text and embroidered it with his usual grotesqueness. But beneath the humor of his illustrations there was an idea less profound perhaps than delicate. Love, however regarded, may not improperly be defined as the union of two beings who complete each other and who, from the stand-point of the Orphic tradition, reciprocally discover in each other what individually they once had and since have lacked. On the other hand, it may be that in the symbolism which Aristophanes employed was an attempt to apply to humanity the theory which Eryximachus had set forth. At the origin of all things is unity, which divides and becomes multiple only to return to its primal shape. Human nature, as masculinely and femininely exemplified, is primitive unity after division has come, and love is the return to that unity which in itself is of all things the compelling law. In other words, one is many, and, love aiding, many are one.

But whatever Aristophanes may have meant, his views were subsidiary. It was to Socrates that Plato reserved the privilege of penetrating into the essence of love and of displaying its progressus and consummation. “How many things that I never thought of,” Socrates on reading his own discourse, exclaimed, “this young man has made me say.”

Among them was an exposition of the fundamental law of human nature, the universal desire for happiness. In the demonstrations that followed good was shown to be a means to happiness; consequently, every one, loving happiness, loves good also. In this sense love belongs to all. Every one, in loving happiness, loves good and craves a perpetual possession of both. But different minds have different ways of attaining the same end. One man aspires to happiness through wealth, another through place, a third through philosophy. These are uninfluenced by Eros. The influence of Eros is exerted when the perpetual possession of happiness is sought in immortality.

But life itself comports no continuity. Life is but a succession of phenomena, of which one departs as another appears, and of which each, created by what has gone before, creates that which ensues, the result being that, though from womb to tomb a man be called the same, never, either mentally or physically, is he. The constant disintegration and renovation of tissues correspond with the constant flux and reflux of sensations, emotions, thoughts. The man of this instant perishes. He is replaced by a new one during the next. That proposition true of the individual is equally true of the species, continuance of either being secured only through reproduction. The love of immortality manifests itself therefore through the reproductive impulse. Beauty, in another, exercises an attractive force that enables a gratification of the impulse which ugliness arrests. Hence comes the love of beauty. In some, it stimulates the body, attracting them to women and inducing them to perpetuate themselves through the production of children. In others, it stimulates the mind, inducing the creation of children such as Lycurgus left to Sparta, Solon to Athens, Homer and Hesiod to humanity, children that built them temples which women-born offspring could not erect.

These are the lesser mysteries of love. The higher mysteries, then unveiled, disclose a dialectic ladder of which the first rung touches earth, the last the divine. To mount from one to the other, love should rise as does the mind which from hypothesis to hypothesis reaches truth. In like manner, love, mounting from form to form, reaches the primordial principle from which all beauty proceeds. The rightful order of going consists in using earthly beauties as ascending steps, passing from one fair form to all fair forms, from fair forms to beautiful deeds, from beautiful deeds to beautiful conceptions, until from beautiful conceptions comes the knowledge of beauty supreme.

“There,” Socrates continued, “is the home of every science and of all philosophy. It is not, though, initiation’s final stage. The heart requires more. Drawn by the power of love, it cannot rest in a sphere of abstraction. It must go higher, higher yet, still higher to the ultimate degree where it unites with beauty divine.”

That union which is the true life is not, Socrates explained, annihilation, nor is it unity, or at least not unity which excludes division. The lover and the beloved are distinct. They are two and yet but one, wedded in immaculate beauty.

“If anything,” Socrates concluded, “can lend value to life it is the spectacle of that beauty, pure, unique, aloof from earthly attributes, free from the vanities of the world. It is a spectacle which, apprehensible to the mind alone, enables the beholder to create, not phantoms, but verities, and in so doing, to merit immortality, if mortal may.”

Socrates, who had been leaning against the table, lay back on his couch. The grave discourse was ended. Aristophanes was preparing to reply. Suddenly there was violent knocking at the door without. A little later the voice of Alcibiades was heard resounding through the court. In a state of great intoxication he was roaring and shouting “Agathon! Where is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon.” Then at once, massively crowned with flowers, half supported by a flute girl, Alcibiades, ribald and importunate, staggered in. The grave discourse was ended, the banquet as well.

There is an Orphic fragment which runs: The innumerable souls that are precipitated from the great heart of the universe swarms as birds swarm. They flutter and sink. From sphere to sphere they fall and in falling weep. They are thy tears, Dionysos. O Liberator divine, resummon thy children to thy breast of light.

In the Epiphanies at Eleusis the doctrine disclosed was demonstrative of that conception. The initiate learned the theosophy of the soul, its cycles and career. In that career the soul’s primal home was color, its sustenance light. From beatitude to beatitude it floated, blissfully, in ethereal evolutions, until, attracted by the forms of matter, it sank lower, still lower, to awake in the senses of man.

The theory detained Plato. In the Phædrus, which is the supplement of the Symposion, he made it refract something approaching the splendor of truth revealed. With Socrates again for mouthpiece, he declared that in anterior existence we all stood a constant witness of the beautiful and the true, adding that, if now the presence of any shape of earthly loveliness evokes a sense of astonishment and delight, the effect is due to reminiscences of what we once beheld when we were other than what we are.

“It seems, then,” Plato noted, “as though we had found again some object, very precious, which, once ours, had vanished. The impression is not illusory. Beauty is really a belonging which we formerly possessed. Mingling in the choir of the elect our souls anteriorly contemplated the eternal essences among which beauty shone. Fallen to this earth we recognize it by the intermediary of the most luminous of our senses. Sight, though the subtlest of the organs, does not perceive wisdom. Beauty is more apparent. At the sight of a face lit with its rays, memory returns, emotions recur, we think love is born in us and it is, yet it is but born anew.”

There is a Persian manuscript which, read one way, is an invocation to love in verse, and which, read backward, is an essay on mathematics in prose. Love is both a poem and a treatise. It was in that aspect Plato regarded it. It had grown since Homer. It had developed since the Song of Songs. With Plato it attained a height which it never exceeded until Plato himself revived with the Renaissance. In the interim it wavered and diminished. There came periods when it passed completely away. Whether Plato foresaw that evaporation, is conjectural. But his projection of the drunken Alcibiades into the gravity of the Banquet is significant. The dissolute, entering suddenly there, routed beauty and was, it may be, but an unconscious prefigurement of the coming orgy in which love also disappeared.

VII

ROMA-AMOR

It was the mission of Rome to make conquests, not statues, not to create, but to quell. Her might reverberated in the roar of her name. Roma means strength. It is only in reading it backward that Amor appears. Love there was secondary. Might had precedence. It was Might that made first the home, then the state, then the senate that ruled the world. That might, which was so great that to ablate it the earth had to bear new races, was based on two things, citizenship and the family. The title Romanus sum was equal to that of rex. The title of matron was superior.

The Romans, primarily but a band of outlaws, carried away the daughters of their neighbors by force. Their first conquest was woman. The next was the gods. In the rude beginnings the latter were savage as they. Revealed in panic and thunder, they were gods of prey and of fright. Rome, whom they mortified, made no attempt to impose them on other people. With superior tact she lured their gods from them. She made love to them. With naïve effrontery she seduced them away. The process Macrobius described. At the walls of any beleaguered city, a consul, his head veiled, pronounced the consecrated words. “If there be here gods that have under their care this people and this city, we pray, supplicate, and adjure them to desert the temples, to abandon the altars, to inspire terror there, to come to Rome near us and ours, that our temples, being more agreeable and precious, may predispose them to protect us. It being understood and agreed that we dedicate to them larger altars, grander games.”13

It was with that formula that Rome conquered the world. She omitted it but once, at the walls of Jerusalem. The deity whom she forgot there to invoke, entered her temples and overthrew them.

Meanwhile the flatteries of the formula no known god could resist. In triumph Rome escorted one after another away, leaving the forsaken but doorposts to worship, and stimulating in them the desire to become part of the favored city where their divinities were. But in that city everything was closed to them. Deserted by their gods, divested, in consequence, of religion and, therefore, of every right, they could no longer pray, the significance of signs and omens was lost to them, they were plebs. But the Romans, who had captivated the divinities, and who, through them, alone possessed the incommunicable science of augury, were patrician. In that distinction is the origin of Rome’s aristocracy and her might.

The might pre-existed in the despotic organization of the home. There the slaves and children were but things that could be sold or killed. They were the chattels of the paterfamilias, whose wife was a being without influence or initiative, a creature in the hands of a man, unable to leave him for any cause whatever, a domestic animal over whom he had the right of life and death, a ward who, regarded as mentally irresponsible —propter animi lævitatem– might not escape his power even though he died, a woman whom he could repudiate at will and of whom he was owner and judge.14

Such was the law and such it remained, a dead letter, nullified by a reason profoundly human, which the legislature had overlooked, but which the Asiatics had foreseen and which they combated with the seraglio where woman, restricted to a fraction of her lord, exhausted herself in contending even for that. But Rome, in making the paterfamilias despotic, made him monogamous as well. He was strictly restricted to one wife. As a consequence, the materfamilias, while theoretically a slave, became practically what woman with her husband to herself and no rivals to fear almost inevitably does become – supreme. Legally she was the property of her husband, actually he was hers. When he returned from forage or from war, she alone had the right to greet him, she alone might console and caress. In the eye of the gods if not of the law she was his equal when not his superior. By virtue of the law he could divorce her at will, he could kill her if she so much as presumed to drink wine. By virtue of her supremacy five hundred and twenty years passed before a divorce occurred.15

The supremacy was otherwise facilitated. The atrium, unlike the gynæceum, was not a remote and inaccessible apartment, it was the living-room, the sanctuary of the household gods, a common hall to which friends were admitted, visitors came, and where the matron presided. From the moment when, in accordance with the ceremonies of marriage, her hair – in memory of the Sabines – parted by a javelin’s point, an iron ring – symbol of eternity – on her fourth finger, the wedding bread eaten, her purchase money paid, and she, lifted over the threshold of the atrium, uttered the sacramental words – Ubi tu Caïus, ibi ego Caïa – from that moment, legally in manum viri, actually she became mistress of whatever her husband possessed, she became his associate, his partner, sharing with him the administration of the patrimony, governing the household, the slaves, Caïus himself.

Said Cato: “Everywhere else women are ruled by men, but we who rule all men, are ruled by women.” They had done so from the first. The treatment of the Sabines was clearly violent in addition to being mythical. But, even in legend, these young women were not deserted as were the Ariadnes and Medeas of Greece. They became Roman matrons, as such circled with respect. Later, Egeria instituted with symbolic nymphs a veritable worship of women. Thereafter feminine prerogatives developed from the theory and practice of marriage itself. In theory, marriage was an association for the pursuit of things human and divine.16 In practice, it was the fusion of two lives – a fusion manifestly incomplete if all were not held in common. Community of goods means equality. From equality to superiority there is but a step. The matron took it. She became supreme as already she was patrician.

Between patrician and plebeian there was an abyss too wide for marriage to bridge. Such a union would have been regarded as abnormal. The plebeian did not at first dare to conceive of such a thing. When later he protested against his helotry it was in silence. He but vacated the city where the earth threatened to open beneath him and where his lost gods brooded inimical still. Ultimately, protests persisting, the patricians consented that these nobodies should be somebodies, provided at least they were men. Already Roman by birth, they became Roman by law.

Whether man or woman, it was a high privilege to be that. The woman who was not, the manumitted slave, the foreigner within the walls, the code disdained to consider. Statutes against shames took no account of her. Beyond the pale even of ethics, the attitude to her of others concerned but herself.

But about the Roman woman were thrown Lycurgian laws. A forfeiture of her honor was a disgrace to the State. Her people killed her —Cognati necanto uti volent– as they liked. On the morrow there was nothing that told of the tragedy save the absence of a woman seen no more. If she were seen, if father or husband neglected his duty, public indictment ensued with death or exile for result. From the indictment and its penalties appeal could be had. From the edile could be obtained the Licentia stupri, the right to the antique livery of shame. But thereafter the purple no longer bordered the robe of the ex-patrician. She could no longer be driven in chariots or be borne in litters by slaves; the fillet, taken from her, was replaced by a yellow wig; a harlot then, she was civilly dead.17

Tacitus has said that under Tiberius a special law had to be enacted to prevent women of rank from such descent. During the austerer days of the republic the derogation was unknown. The Greek ideal of woman which the hetaira exemplified was beauty. Honor, which was the Roman ideal, the matron achieved.

To the matrons reverently Rome bowed. The purple border on their mantle compelled respect. The modesty of their eyes and ears was protected by grave laws. In days of danger the senate asked their aid. The gods could have no purer incense than their prayers. There was no homage greater than their esteem. Such a word as dignity was too colorless to be employed regarding them, it was the term majesty that was used. The vestal was but a more perfect type of these women on whose tomb univiræ– the wife of one man – was alone inscribed.

The honor of the Roman matron was a national affair, the honor of a Roman girl a public concern. Because of the one, royalty was abolished. Because of the other, the decemvirs fell. In neither case was there revolution. On the contrary. In the first instance, that of Lucretia, it was the insurrection of Tarquin against the inviolability of virtue. In the second, that of Virginia, it was the insurrection of Appius Claudius against the inviolability of love, dual insurrections, probably mythical, which Rome, with legendary fury, suppressed, and which, whether historic or imaginary, was typical of the energetic character that made her what she was, proud, despotic, sovereign of the world.

“The empire that Rome won,” St. Augustin, with agreeable ingenuousness, remarked, “God gave her in order that, though pagan and consequently unrewardable hereafter, her virtues should not remain unrecognized below.” Nor were they, and that, too, despite the fact that they omitted to endure, except, as Cicero said, in books; “in old books,” he added, “which no one reads any more.” But in the interim three things had occurred. Greece, wounded to the death, had flooded Rome with the hemorrhages of her expiring art. Asia had undyked the sea of her corruption. Both had cascaded their riches. Rome hitherto had been poor, she had been puritan. Hers had been the peasant’s hard plain life. The costume of the matron, which custom had made stately, the lex Oppia had made severe. This statute, passed at the time of the Carthagenian invasion, was a measure of public utility devised to increase the budget of war. Its abrogation coincided with the fall of Macedon and the return of Æmilius Paulus, bringing with him the sack of seventy cities, the prodigious booty of ravaged Greece, the prelude to that of the East. Behind these eruptions was the contagion of fastidious caprices that demoralized Rome.

Heretofore, innocent of excesses, ignorant of refinements, in antique simplicity, Rome had sat briefly and upright before her frugal fare. Thereafter, on cushioned beds were repasts, long and savorous, eaten to the sound of crotal and of flute. There were after-courses of ballerine and song, the refreshment of perfume, the luxurious tonic of the bath, the red feather that enabled one to eat again, the marvels of Asiatic debauchery, the surprises of Hellenic grace. In the charm of foreign spells former austerities were forgot. Romans who had not been initiated in them abroad had the returning victors for tutors at home.

Sylla was particularly instructive. Carthagenian in ferocity, Babylonian in lubricity, Hamilcar and Belshazzar in one, the ugliest and most formidable Roman of the lot, his life, which an ulcer ravaged, was a succession of massacres, orgies, and crimes. Married one after another to three women of wealth, who to him were but stepping stones to fortune, on a day when he was preparing to give one of those festivals, the splendor and the art of which he had learned from Mithridates, his third wife fell ill. Death discourages Fortune. Sylla sent her a bill of divorce and ordered her to be taken from the house, which was done, just in time, she was dying. Sylla promptly remarried, then married again, and yet again. Meanwhile, he had a daughter and an eye on the promising Pompey. His daughter was married. So too was Pompey. He forced his daughter from her husband, forced Pompey to repudiate his wife, and forced them to marry.

Sylla had brought with him from the East its curious cups in which blood and passion mingled, and spilled them in the open streets. Crassus outdid him in magnificence, and Lucullus eclipsed them both. Asia had yielded to these men the fortune of her people, the honor of her children, the treasure of her temples, the secrets of their sin. The Orientalisms which they imported, their deluge of coin, their art of marrying cruelty to pleasure, set Rome mad.

Among the maddest was Catiline. That tiger, in whose vestibule were engraved the laws of facile love, affiliated women of rank, others of none, soldiers and slaves, in his convulsive cause. Shortly, throughout the Latin territory, a mysterious sound was heard. It was like the clash of arms afar. The augurs, interrogated, announced that the form of the State was about to change. The noise was the crackling of the republic.18