Copy 1, Volume 1

The history of the manners and customs of ancient Greece / By J.A. St. John.

  • James Augustus St. John
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of the manners and customs of ancient Greece / By J.A. St. John. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that she may preserve the existence of one beloved still more than life.1 Nay, to prove the elevated conceptions of love that prevailed in earlier Greece, we find a personi¬ fication of this passion reckoned among the most ancient gods of its mythology. Altars were erect¬ ed, festivals instituted, sacrifices offered up to it, as to a power, in its origin and nature divine.2 It breathed the breath of life into their poetry, it was supposed to elicit music and verse from the coldest human clay, like the sun’s rays from the fabulous Memnon—it allied itself in its energies with freedom—to love, in the imagination of a Greek, was to cease to be a slave,3—it emancipated and rendered noble whomsoever it inspired,—it float¬ ed winged through the air, and descended even in dreams4 upon the mind of men or women, reveal¬ ing to sight the forms of persons unknown, anni¬ hilating distance, trampling over rank, confounding together gods and men by its irresistible force.5 Much of the beauty of their fables is concealed from us by the atmosphere of triteness and fami¬ liarity with which our injudicious education invests them. Every puling sonneteer babbles of Eros. And Aphrodite, a creature of the imagination brighter and lovelier than her own star, has been rendered more common in modern verse, than the most celebrated 1 Even Lucian could discover that there was something holy in love. Renvoi' ovv dpeporEpo) yivEi 7ro'0oi' tyKEpaoupivr], cvve^ei)- Iev dXXi]XoiQ bsapov ciVdyoye daiov. Amor. § 19. 2 See too in Stobaeus, the ad¬ dresses of a bereaved husband to philosophy—oi (piXoaucpiu, Tvpuv- vikcL aov tie EmTu.yp.aTU; XEyeig <pi\EC K(/.v d.Tro€d\r) tiq, XEyEic, pi) Xinrov. 99. 34. Cl. Senec. Epist. 99. Scheffer, ad ./Elian. 27. p. 471. 3 Max. Tyr. x. 119. This author observes that the love de¬ picted by the tragedians was a piece of ill-regulated passion rarely leading to happiness. Id. 123. 124. Cf. Luc. Amor. § 37. 4 ’E£ ovEipwv ipaorrp;. Max. Tyr. x. 126. 5 See the invocation to Love in Lucian: rrv yap it, dfurove Kni KE\ypEvr\G ctpoptptttQ to nuv f.pdp- (jiiocruc. k. t. X. Amor. § 32.