Brinton adds that "these same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow in developing their conception of sexual love.

Brinton remarks that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.
Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.
This has been well brought out by E.F.M.Benecke in his _Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is highly instructive from the present point of view.

The Greek lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age.

True love for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual.

The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the family.