The question has not yet been finally settled whether shame in regard to the uncovering of parts of the body is or is not a mere social convention. It is a point which anthropologists should decide. A curious contribution to it occurs in a recent book of travels by G. F. Scott Elliot. “These people,” he says of the Wakavirondo,[211] “are dressed chiefly in air, and, as one always finds in scantily clothed native races, are peculiarly moral as compared with the decently attired Waganda and other races. In Madagascar, West Africa, and the Cape I have always found the same rule. Chastity varies inversely as the amount of covering.” Mr. Henry T. Finck discusses the question fully in his chapter on nudity and bathing, with copious illustrations from the sentiments and practices of various countries, in his ‘Lotos-Time in Japan.’[212] But whatever the results of such inquiries may be, they seem to me to bear only slightly on the determination of the influence which women have exercised in past times. (3) LOVE-MAKING IN HOMER’S TIME. There is no trace in Homer of that passionate and bewildering love of a man for a woman which is the favourite theme of modern novels. Buchholz, in discussing the feelings of the Homeric Greeks in regard to sexual passion, thus describes this love: “Von der Ueberschwänglichkeit der modernen Gefühlsschwärmerei, vermöge deren zwei Individuen verschiedenen Geschlechts mit himmelhochjauchzendem Entzücken im Gefühle des ewigen Füreinanderexistirens und Ineinanderaufgehens sich berauschen und selige Wonne schlürfen, haben die homerischen Menschen keine Idee.”[213] There has been much discussion as to when Greek writers began to treat of this love. There is a full treatment of the subject in Rohde’s ‘Der Griechische Roman’ (p. 14), where he refers to the essay of Bulwer Lytton on the influence of love and real life, and quotes his opinion that it is in Euripides that first appears the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment. Bennecke devotes a large portion of his chapter on ‘Women in Greek Poetry’ to show that “there is no trace in literature of what we now understand by the word ‘love’ earlier than the end of the fourth century B.C.” “The general consensus of opinion,” he says, “has agreed to ascribe this great change, the greatest change, perhaps, that has ever come over art, to the influence of two men, Euripides and Menander. My object in writing now is to endeavour to show, firstly, that this general view is a mistaken one, arising from an insufficient appreciation of the true nature of the change; and, secondly, that the real originator of the new feeling which we encounter in Alexandrian literature--in other words, the first man who had the courage to say that a woman is worth loving--was Antimachus of Colophon.”[214] It is evident that Bennecke’s appreciation of modern love is widely different from that of Buchholz. CHAPTER II.