If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn’t read one poem in which a character of the woman who’s loved is described or matters.
“Now if you’re a human being, you probably realize that it’s possible for you to degenerate into a beast; people who don’t acknowledge this have actually degenerated in a different way, have lost a certain amount of self insight. And you can regress into being an ape, if that’s what you really want to do.”
Gene Wolfe