Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female boy-friends." AEschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves.

There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love.

Benecke concludes (p.

67) that in Greece sexual love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.
It was in Magna Graecia rather than in Greece itself that men took interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of women was regarded as a matter of life and death.

Thereafter the conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in European life.