clubs, sometimes and swords, and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find.  Powers relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to assist the women in their drudgery.  Thereupon the women, instead of setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness, take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly.  Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex, wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic love.

PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY

From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet the transition is easy and natural.  To the Indian, as Parkman points out, “pity was a cowardly weakness,” to be sternly repressed as unworthy of a man.  Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to repress and which are “deemed the part of a woman” (Repub., X., 665).  As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler phases of the love between men and women—­fusing their hearts and blending their souls—­Plato’s inability to appreciate such a thing may be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies.  Of the marriage of souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing.  To him, as to his countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.

From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner’s Tannhaeuser.  As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]: 

“Venus shares only the joys of Tannhaeuser, while Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him.  Venus is carnal and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and self-sacrificing.  Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles; the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful infatuation of Tannhaeuser.  The abandoned Venus threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of grief.”

There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the husbands.  Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband’s joys and sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband’s part; yet Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of the Greeks.  An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we consider the curious Greek adoration of boys.  Callicratides, in Lucian’s [Greek:  Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking gymnastic and military exercises.  “Who would not like,” he continues,