of girls who, from childhood, would rather climb trees and fences and play soldiers with the boys than fondle dolls or play with the other girls.  When they get older they prefer tobacco to candy; they love to masquerade in men’s clothes, and when they hear of a girl’s love-affair they cannot understand what pleasure there can be in dancing with a man or kissing him, while they themselves may long to kiss a girl, nay, in numerous cases, to marry her.[301] Many such marriages are made between women whose brains and bodies are of different sexes, and their love-affairs are often characterized by violent jealousy and other symptoms of intersexual passion.  Not a few prominent persons have been innocent victims of this distressing disease; it is well-known what strange masculine proclivities several eminent female novelists and artists have shown; and whenever a woman shows great creative power or polemic aggressiveness the chances are that her brain is of the masculine type.  It is therefore quite possible that Sappho may have been personally a pure woman, her mental masculinity ("mascula Sappho” Horace calls her) being her misfortune, not her fault.  But even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and take for granted that she had enough character to resist the abnormal impulses and passions which she describes in her poems, and which the Greeks easily pardoned and even praised, we cannot and must not overlook the fact that these poems are the result of a diseased brain-centre, and that what they describe is not love, but a phase of erotic pathology.  Normal sexual appetite is as natural a passion as the hunger for food; it is simply a hunger to perpetuate the species, and without it the world would soon come to an end; but Sapphic passion is a disease which luckily cannot become epidemic because it cannot perpetuate itself, but must always remain a freak.[302]

ANACREON AND OTHERS

There is considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the earliest Greek poets.  By dint of ingenious conjectures and combinations philologists have reached the conclusion that the Homeric poems, with their interpolations, originated between the dates 850 and 720 B.C.—­say 2700 years ago.  Hesiod probably flourished near the end of the seventh century, to which Archilochus and Alcman belong, while in the sixth and fifth centuries a number of names appear—­little more than names, it is true, since of most of them fragments only have come down to us—­Alcaeus, Mimnermus, Theognis, Sappho, Stesichorus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Bacchylides, Pindar, and others.  Best known of all these, as a poet of love, is Anacreon, though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual.  Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as “an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate,” and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic love,