The Greek Tragedies are treated after the same fashion as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. We are told that the remarkable prominence given in Sophocles’s plays to the affection between brother and sister affords conclusive proof that the nature of modern love between man and woman was unknown to him; and we are also informed, that the relations between Electra and Orestes, and Antigone and Polynices “are absolutely those of modern lovers.” It would be difficult to say which is more absurd, the deduction or the statement. What love could be more loyal and more passionate than Hæmon’s love for Antigone? The prominence given by Sophocles to the love between brother and sister has its origin from the same cause as the very small part played by lovers in the Greek tragedies generally. In the first place, a poet who took his plot from the fortunes of the houses of Pelops or Laius could only work within the limits of tradition; in the second place, love romances, unless involving deep tragical issues as in the _Trachiniæ_, the _Medea_, and the _Hippolytus_, were totally incompatible with the Greek idea of tragedy. But we must hurry to the grand discovery made by the author of this volume. Somewhere about 405 B.C. flourished Antimachus, of Colophon, the author of a voluminous epic, and of several other poems. He had the misfortune to lose his wife Lyde, and, to beguile his sorrow, he composed a long elegy in her honour. Of the far-reaching consequences of this act let our author speak. “When Antimachus first sat down in his empty house at Colophon to write an elegy to his dead wife, consciously or unconsciously he was initiating the greatest artistic revolution that the world has ever seen.” Asclepiades and Philetas followed him as imitators, and the thing was done. Woman was at last “connected with ‘romance.’” Our author admits the difficulty of supposing that “any one man could invent and popularize an entirely new emotion”; but suggests that if we regard it as “simply due to the readjustment of an already existing emotion,” that is παιδεραστια, such a supposition is “no longer absurd.” It is not only absurd but monstrous.