In the Iliad and Odyssey little is said about love directly; and yet
it is not to be forgotten that the moving force of the Trojan war was
the beauty of Helen, and the central interest of the return of
Odysseus is the passionate fidelity of Penelope.[1] Yet more than
this; when the poet has to speak of the matter, he never fails to rise
to the occasion in a way that even now we can see to be unsurpassable.
The Achilles of the Iliad may speak scornfully of Briseis, as
insufficient cause to quarrel on;[2] the silver-footed goddess, set
above all human longings, regards the love of men and women from her
icy heights with a light passionless contempt.[3] But in the very
culminating point of the death-struggle between Achilles and Hector,
it is from the whispered talk of lovers that the poet fetches the
utmost touch of beauty and terror;[4] and it is in speaking to the
sweetest and noblest of all the women of poetry that Odysseus says the
final word that has yet been said of married happiness.[5]

In this heroic period love is only spoken of incidentally and
allusively. The direct poetry of passion belongs to the next period,
only known to us now by scanty fragments, "the spring-time of
song,"[6] the period of the great lyric poets of the sixth and seventh
centuries B.C. There human passion and emotion had direct expression,
and that, we can judge from what is left to us, the fullest and most
delicate possible. Greek life then must have been more beautiful than
at any other time; and the Greek language, much as it afterwards
gained in depth and capacity of expressing abstract thought, has never
again the same freshness, as though steeped in dew and morning
sunlight. Sappho alone, that unique instance of literature where from
a few hundred fragmentary lines we know certainly that we are in face
of one of the great poets of the world, expressed the passion of love