"Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of marriage. We find little of it in Homer... As refinement grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles we hear of “Love” who “rules at will the gods,” and in Euripides many a passage proclaims Eros’ power... Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of “possession” or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate."
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CH. XIII The Morals and Manners of the Greeks, Sec VIII Love and Marriage, P.385
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization
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The Story of Civilization
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