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PREFACE
PREFACE The very ruins of the Greek world instruct us how our modern life might be made supportable.
RICHARD WAGNER
"One day Odysseus was roaming about the foot of the mountains of Delphi, hunting, when he fell in with two maidens holding one another by the hand. One of them had glossy, black hair, clear eyes, and a grave look. She said to him: 'I am Arete.' The other had drooping eyelids, delicate hands, and tender breasts. She said: 'I am 'Tryphe.' And both exclaimed: 'Choose between us.' But the subtile Odysseus answered sagely. 'How should I choose? You are inseparable. The eyes that have seen you pass by separately have witnessed but a barren shadow. Just as sincere virtue does not repel the eternal joys that pleasure offers it, in like manner self-indulgence would be in evil plight without a certain nobility of spirit. I will follow both of you. Show me the way.' No sooner had he finished speaking than the two visions were merged in one another, and Odysseus knew that he had been talking with the great golden Aphrodite."
The principal character of the novel which the reader is about to have under his eyes is a woman, a courtesan of antiquity; but let him take heart of grace: she will not be converted in the end.
She will be loved neither by a saint, nor by a prophet, nor by a god. In the literature of to-day this is a novelty.
A courtesan, she will be a courtesan with the frankness, the ardour, and also the conscious pride of every human being who has a vocation and has freely chosen the place he occupies in society; she will aspire to rise to the highest point; the idea that her life demands excuse or mystery will not even cross her mind. This point requires elucidation.
Hitherto, the modern writers who have appealed to a public less prejudiced than that of young girls and upper-form boys have resorted to a laborious stratagem the hypocrisy of which is displeasing to me. "I have painted pleasure as it really is," they say, "in order to exalt virtue." In commencing a novel which has Alexandria for its scene, I refuse absolutely to perpetuate this anachronism.
It is obvious that the life of the ancients cannot be judged according to the ideas of morality which we owe to Geneva.
For my part, I have written this book with the same simplicity as an Athenian narrating the same adventures. I hope that it will be read in the same spirit.
With the object of defending Greek morals, it is the custom to quote the teaching of certain philosophers who reproved sexual pleasures. But there exists a confusion in this matter. These rare moralists blamed the excesses of all the senses without distinction, without setting up any difference between the debauch of the bed and that of the table. A man who orders a solitary dinner which costs him six louis, at a modern Paris restaurant, would have been judged by them to be as guilty, and no less guilty, than a man who should make a rendez-vous of too intimate a nature in the public street and should be condemned therefore to a year's imprisonment by the existing laws. Moreover, these austere philosophers were generally regarded by ancient society as dangerous madmen; they were scoffed at in every theatre; they received thrashings in the street; the tyrants chose them for their court jesters, and the citizens of free States sent them into exile, when they did not deem them worthy of capital punishment.
It is, then, by a conscious and voluntary fraud, that modern educators, from the Renaissance to the present day, have represented the ancient code of morality as the inspiring source of their narrow virtues. If this code was great, if it deserves to be chosen for a model and to be obeyed, it is precisely because none other has more successfully distinguished the just from the unjust according to a criterion of beauty; proclaimed the right of all men to find their individual happiness within the bounds to which it is limited by the corresponding right of others, and declared that there is nothing under heaven more sacred than physical love, nothing more beautiful than the human body.
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