Woman in the
Golden Ages

By

Amelia Gere Mason

New York
The Century Co.
1901

Copyright, 1901, by
The Century Co.

Published October, 1901.

THE DEVINNE PRESS.

TO THE
REPRESENTATIVE WOMEN
OF TO-DAY

PREFACE

In this series of detached essays I have tried to gather and group the most salient and essential facts relating to the character, position, and intellectual attainments of women in the great ages of the world. It is not an easy matter to trace with any exactness the lives of women of classic times, as they were largely ignored by men who chronicled events. If the historians gave them any place at all, it was an insignificant one, concerning only their relations to men, and they were more inclined to sing the praises of those who ministered to masculine caprices than of those distinguished for any merit whatever. There were exceptions in the cases of a few women of very remarkable gifts; but even these were subject to the worst aspersions, for the simple reason that they had the courage of their talents and convictions. This fashion of considering women only as convenient appendages of men may account largely for the space given to those of more beauty and sensuous charm than decorum—a fact which has doubtless misled after-ages. It accounts also for the reckless flings of satirists and comedians, who were even less to be trusted in early times than they are to-day. Truth compels me to recall more or less the contemptuous attitude of men, as it was too large a factor in determining the position of women to be omitted. But in no case has it been exaggerated, or set down in a spirit of antagonism.

The most striking points in the lives of world-famous women are sufficiently familiar. True or false, they are often quoted in proof of one theory or another. But a few isolated facts gathered at random count for little. It is only in the grouping of many facts of many ages that the real quality of the old types of womanhood can be clearly discerned. One is constantly confronted, however, with discrepancies in the records. This may be readily understood when we consider the impossibility of getting a correct version of things that happen next door to us. Reports of events and estimates of character are about as various as the people who offer them. One can only accept those which have the most inherent probability, or are given by the chronicler who has the best reputation for veracity. So far as possible, I have relied upon contemporary writers for the facts of their own age; but I am also indebted largely to the research of the great modern historians. In the few classic or Italian translations, I have usually availed myself of those nearest at hand, if they had the stamp of authority, though they might not always be the latest, perhaps not even the best.

These essays are limited mainly to the golden ages of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, with a brief interlude that serves as a transition from pagan to medieval times. The mantle of the great Italians fell upon the women of the golden age of France, who reached the summit of the power and influence of their sex in the past. The personality and intellectual influence of these women I have considered at length in “The Women of the French Salons.”

The inevitable “woman question” is not touched except as it may appear in the effort to show, in a small degree, the intellectual quality and influence of some of the representative women of the past, and to vindicate them from charges which are often as untrue as unjust. Without any pretension to profound learning or philosophic criticism, I have simply presented the most significant facts available, with their various settings, and a few plain conclusions which may be insufficient, but which are at least sincere and carefully considered. In estimates of people I have taken the most charitable view possible without sacrificing truth to imagination. It is the safer side in which to err, as the world has always been much more active in the spread of calumny than of praise, especially where women are concerned.

There is no pretense to historical continuity, or to a serious study of present conditions, in the single modern essay. It simply considers one phase of our own age, which we doubtless claim to be altogether golden.

The work has been a labor of love. If I have succeeded in throwing any fresh light upon the women of long ago, many of whom are already half mythical, or in giving a clear impression of what we owe them, my long and pleasant hours among old chronicles and forgotten records will not have been in vain.

Amelia Gere Mason.

August, 1901.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

It has been quite gravely asserted of late that “woman has just discovered her intellect.” As a result of this we are told with great earnestness that the nineteenth century belonged to her by virtue of conquest, and that she is entering upon a new era of power and intelligence which is to usher in the millennium.

On the other hand, we are assured with equal persistency that the divine order of things is being upset: that women are spoiled by over-education; that the time-honored privileges of men are ruthlessly invaded and their mental vigor endangered; that morals are suffering; that all the good old ideals are in process of destruction; and that we have the dismal prospect of being ruled, to our sorrow, by a race of Minervas who neglect their families, if they have any, and insist upon running things in their own way, to the ruin of social order—all of which has been said periodically since the beginning of the world.

With these serious questions I do not attempt to deal any further than to picture, to the best of my ability in a limited space, the position of women in the great ages of the past, and the personality, aspirations, and achievements of a few of their most famous representatives, so far as this is possible after the lapse of centuries. From a multiplicity of facts which point their own moral, each one of us may draw his or her special lessons.

It is quite true that the woman of to-day is putting her intellect to new uses; possibly she has become more vividly conscious of it. We know also that the average intelligence of all classes of women, as well as of men, was never so high as now. But the intrinsic force of the human intellect is not measured by averages. A thousand satellites do not make a sun, though they may shine for ages by the light of one. Then, whatever our achievements may be—and I do not underrate them—it would reflect rather seriously on the feminine mind to suppose that it could lie practically dormant all these centuries, even under the heavy disabilities which were imposed upon it. The fact that women have always been in subjection and on the whole very much oppressed and trampled upon, especially in the early ages, makes it all the more remarkable that they have left so many striking examples, not only of the highest wisdom and intelligence, but of the highest executive power, ever since Deborah sat as a judge in Israel, Miriam sang immortal songs of heroic deeds, and Semiramis conquered Asia.

No doubt our own deserts are great, and we do well to burn a fair amount of incense to them; but possibly the smoke of it is so dense that we fail to see all the fine things that have been done before us. Other women have been as clever as we are, and as strong, if not individually stronger; many have been as good, a few perhaps have been more wicked than most of us; and the majority have had a great deal more to complain of. “There is nothing new under the sun” was written so long ago that it seems as if there could have been nothing old. Even the “new woman” has her prototypes in the past, who have thought, written, lectured, ruled, asserted themselves, and been honored as well as talked about in their day. Men have prophesied strange revolutions in human affairs because of them, and sometimes have sent them back to the chimney-corner and silence, as one of our own chivalrous writers says they will do again if this irrepressible being who presumes to have opinions makes things too uncomfortable for them. But the world has gone on marrying and giving in marriage, and growing in the main, let us hope, happier and better, while the social condition of women has steadily improved, with an occasional reaction, in spite of the fears of the timid and the sneers of the cynical.

It may be safely said that there was not much in the lives of the women of two or three thousand years ago which we should care to repeat. Their field was, as a rule, narrow and restricted, their privileges were few, their burdens and sorrows were many. To go outside the sphere prescribed for them called for great talent and great courage, since respectability was usually regarded as synonymous with insignificance. But even in this aspiring, much-knowing, self-gratulatory, woman-honoring twentieth century, whenever we are told that the feminine intellect is inherently weak and has never created anything worthy of immortality, we point with pride to Sappho, the one woman poet of the world whose claim to the first rank has never been disputed. If we wish to illustrate the social and political influence of woman, we cite Aspasia, the trusted confidante and adviser of the greatest statesmen and philosophers, as well as the presiding genius of the first salon of which we have any knowledge. Yet these women lived in the dawn of the present order of things. We may recall the scholarly mind and masterly executive qualities of Zenobia, which perhaps have never been exceeded; the profound learning and brilliant oratory of Hypatia, who was torn in pieces because of them by the fanatical Alexandrian mob; Cornelia, gifted and austere, adding the courage of a Stoic to the tenderness of a mother; Livia, wise, tactful, and far-seeing; Marcella, saint and grande dame, a savante, a leader, and a heroine. Other figures of the classic ages, grave and thoughtful, clever and brilliant, or mystical and sweet, pass in stately array before us, each supreme in her own field. It may have been an intellectual gift that she had; it may have been a masterful character, or a heroic virtue, or a spirit of sublime self-sacrifice, or a faith so exalted that it has illuminated all the centuries. Each of these traits has its illustrious examples among the women of long ago.

Passing ages of darkness, in which here and there the talent of a Countess Matilda or an Héloïse shone brightly through the mists of ignorance and superstition, we find the women of a new era delving side by side with men in the mines of classic lore, and bringing to their work the same enthusiasm, the same untiring patience. We find them, too, versed in all the learning of their time. If we are disposed to plume ourselves overmuch on our intellectual glories, it may serve as a lesson in humility to recall the wonderful women of the Renaissance, who filled chairs of philosophy and law in the universities, sustained public theses, spoke in Latin before learned societies, wrote pure Greek and studied Hebrew, preached in cathedrals were sent on special embassies and consulted on grave affairs of State by popes and kings. With all our latter-day prestige and the chivalry of modern men, it would be difficult to imagine Leo XIII or the German Emperor consulting a woman on serious questions of policy, or even listening to one unless she were a queen with power that must be reckoned with. If they did, it would be behind closed doors where no one could know it. Yet we have wise women and able ones.

When men lost themselves in metaphysical abstractions it was the “new woman” of the Renaissance who lent wings to their minds and stimulated creation. A touch from her uncaged intellect thrilled the learning of the age and put into it a soul. A Vittoria Colonna inspires a Michelangelo, writes an immortal in memoriam, and brings poetry to the service of religion. An Olympia Morata pauses in her high intellectual flight to give an object-lesson in moral courage and the virtues of a gentle womanhood. A Catherine of Siena thinks as well as loves, writes as well as prays; the head of Christendom is moved by her wise counsels, and the currents of the world are changed.

It was woman, too, who married thought to life, presided at the birth of society, and diffused the seeds of the new knowledge. She took philosophy out of the obscurity of ponderous tomes, and made men reduce it to clear terms with the logical processes left out, so that the unlettered might read. If men held the palm of supremacy in reason and abstract thought, women illuminated them by sentiment and imagination, so touching the world to living issues. The swift, facile, intuitive intellects of women complemented the slower and more logical minds of men, and it is this union that creates life in all its larger, more enduring forms. It was the social gifts of women added to a flexible intelligence that raised conversation to a fine art. A Duchess Leonora, an Isabella d’Este, a Duchess Elisabetta, call about them the wit, learning, talent, and genius of an age, and in this atmosphere poets, artists, and men of letters find an audience and an inspiration. Each gives of his best, which is fostered and turned into new channels. Standards are raised by the association of various forms of excellence, and society reaches a higher altitude of living and thinking. To be sure, the day comes when it matters more to talk and be talked about than it does to know. The rank weeds of mediocrity spring up in profusion and overshadow the flowers. The ideals droop and the brilliant age ends. But it has fulfilled its mission, and all ages end, great and small, luminous and dark alike.

Did men degenerate in the intellectual companionship of women? To what glorious heights did they attain in the dark ages, when no woman’s voice was heard, except in prayer? What heights have they reached in any period that did not find its ideals in brute force, when, at least, a few women of light and leading did not stand at their side, though only by courtesy, instead of sitting at their feet?

Did women lose in morals when they gained in intelligence, as men so often delight to tell us? Quite the reverse, if I have read history aright. In seasons of moral decadence it is the women of serious education who have been among the first to lift their voices against the sins of the period in which they lived. If they were often swept along by the current which they had no power to stem, it was because of their helplessness, not of their knowledge. They were not faultless but human, and subject at all periods to the same conditions that were fatal to men, who claimed supremacy in strength. If they have sometimes broken on the rocks of superstition, it was because they had too little intelligence, not too much.

Have they lost the tender instincts of wifehood and motherhood? The records of the world are full of the unselfish devotion of great wives and great mothers, and the men who shine most conspicuously on the pages of history, from Cæsar and the Gracchi to George Washington and Daniel Webster, have been the sons of able and intelligent women. A cultivated intellect is not a guaranty of virtue, but it has never yet made a woman forget her love and allegiance to a strong and noble man, or turn a cold ear to the artless prattle of a child, though vanity and weakness and folly have done so very often. But it has many a time given her the power and the impulse to rear a world-famed monument to the one, and to give the best work and thought of a self-sacrificing life for the glory of the other. It is not simply heredity, but the atmosphere and companionship of the first years, that make or mar a destiny. But let us not confound intelligent women with pedants and pretenders, or great women with small ones on a pedestal of any sort, self-erected or other.

All this I trust will be made clear by illustration in these pages, together with the fact that the intellects of at least a few women have been very much awake in all the golden ages of the world, and exercised on many of the same problems that confront them to-day. The question of equality has been discussed in every period. It is needless to pursue these discussions here any further than to recall them. It does not signify whether women have or have not done this, that, or the other thing as well as men—whether they have or have not been conspicuous for creative genius, or scientific genius, or any other special form of genius. It is as idle to ask whether they are, on the whole, equal or inferior to men, as to ask whether an artist is equal to a general, an inventor to a philosopher, or a poet to a man of science. There are certain things that will always be done better by men; there are other things of equal value to the happiness and well-being of the race, and worthy of equal honor, that will always be done better by women; there are still other and many things that may be done equally well by either. The final proof of ability lies in its tangible result, and it is a waste of words to speculate on unknown quantities, or to say that under certain conditions women might have attained specific heights which they have not attained. No doubt it is true, but one cannot deal with shadows. We have to consider things as they are, with the possibilities toward which they point.

But the past we have, with its achievements and its lessons. We find that women, with all their restrictions and in spite of denunciations from men which seem incredible, have long ago touched their highest mark in poetry, in wisdom, in administration, in learning, and in social power. In the great ages of the flowering of the human intellect, a rare few have always stood on the heights, beacon-stars which sent out their rays to distant centuries. As the world has advanced they have increased in number more than in altitude; but barriers have been removed, one after another, until they have practically ceased to exist. It is worth while, however, to bear in mind that four hundred years ago a woman, with many disabilities, had ample facilities for reaching her full intellectual stature with honor and without hindrance. Why did her sex lose these privileges so liberally accorded to men, in the “land of the free” and the early nineteenth century?

We too have our stars—our women who think, our women who know, our women who do; we too have our special distinctions—our triumphs in new fields in which we have had no rivals. But I have touched only a single phase of modern life. There are too many fresh and difficult problems to be disposed of in an essay. Then we can hardly hear the message of the age for the din of the voices. It is true enough that the old ideals are disappearing. What we do not know yet is whether, apart from the intelligence which gives all life a fresh impulse and meaning, the new ones forced upon us by the march of events are better. It suffices here to say that what really signifies to the woman of to-day is to expand in her own natural proportions, to maintain her own individuality without the loss of her essential charm, to temper strength of soul with tenderness, to strive for achievement instead of the passing honors of the hour, to preserve the fine and dignified quality of an enlarged and perfected womanhood. It is not as the poor copy of a man that she will ever come into her rightful kingdom. Duty or necessity may lead one into strange and hard paths, but the crown of glory is not for those who fling away their birthright to join in the strident chorus of the eager crowd that kneels before the glittering altars of the money-gods, or to follow the procession that throngs the dusty highways and, lifting its eyes no more to the mountain-tops, sings its own apotheosis in the market-place.

WOMAN IN GREEK POETRY

· Denunciation of Woman in Early Poets ·
· Kindlier Attitude of Homer ·
· Penelope · Nausicaä · Andromache · Helen ·
· Contemptuous Attitude of the Dramatists ·
· Their Fine Types ·
· Iphigenia · Alcestis · Antigone ·
· Consideration for Women in the Heroic Age ·

I

“The badness of man is better than the goodness of woman,” says a Jewish proverb. And worse still, “A man of straw is better than a woman of gold.” As men made the proverbs, these may be commended for modesty as well as chivalry. The climax is reached in this amiable sentiment: “A dead wife is the best goods in a man’s house.” Under such teaching it is not at all surprising that the Jews began their morning invocations, two thousand years ago, with these significant words: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a heathen, who hast not made me a slave, who hast not made me a woman.”

These are very good samples of the manner in which women were talked of in ancient days. In Egypt, however, they fared rather better. We are even told that men pledged obedience to their wives, in which case they doubtless spoke of them more respectfully. At all events, they had great political influence, were honored as priestess or prophetess, and had the privilege of owning themselves and their belongings. But a state of affairs in which

Men indoors sit weaving at the loom,
And wives outdoors must earn their daily bread,

has its unpleasant side. How it was regarded by women does not appear, but if they found a paradise they were speedily driven out of it. Evidently men did not find the exchange of occupations agreeable. Two or three centuries before our era, a Greek ruler came to the throne, who had other views, and every woman awoke one morning to the fact that her day was ended, her power was gone, and that she owned nothing at all. Everything that she had, from her house and her land to her feathers and her jewels, was practically confiscated, so that she could no longer dispose of it. These women had rights, and lost them. Why they were taken away we do not know. Possibly too much was claimed. But all this goes to prove that “chivalrous man” cannot be trusted so long as he holds not simply the balance of power, but the whole of it.

Apart from this little episode, the early world never drifted far from the traditions of the Garden of Eden, where Adam naturally reserved the supremacy for himself, and sent obedient Eve about her housewifely duties among the roses and myrtles. If these were soon turned into thorns and thistles, it was only her proper punishment for bringing into the world its burden of human ills.

The changes were rung on this theme in all races and languages. The esthetic Greeks surpassed the Jews in their denunciations, and exhausted their wit in cynical phrases that lacked even the dignity of criticism. No writers have abused women more persistently. It is an evidence of great moral vitality that, in the face of such undisguised contempt, they were able to maintain any prestige at all. If we may credit the poets who gave the realistic side of things, there was neither honor nor joy in the life of the average woman who dwelt in the shadow of Helicon. It was bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate. This pastoral existence, which seems so serene, had its serpent, and that serpent was a woman. A wife was a necessary evil. If a man did not marry, he was doomed to a desolate age; if he did, his happiness was sure to be ruined. Out of ten types of women described by the elder Simonides, only one was fit for a wife, and this was because she had the nature of a bee and was likely to add to her husband’s fortune. As the proportion was so small, the risk may be imagined. Her side of the question was never taken into account at all. The comfort of so insignificant a being was really not worth considering. “A man has but two pleasant days with his wife,” says the satirist; “one when he marries her, the other when he buries her.”

Hesiod mentions, among the troubles of having a wife, that she insists upon sitting at table with her husband. Later, when the Greeks found their pleasure in fields of the intellect which were closed to women, even this poor privilege was usually denied her, and always when other men were present. Hesiod was evidently a disappointed man, and took dark views of things, women in particular, but he only followed the fashion of his time in making them responsible for the troubles and sorrows of men. It was the old, old story: “The woman gave me, and I did eat.” She was the Pandora who had let loose upon the world all the ills, and kept in her box the hope that might have made them tolerable. If she found her position an unpleasant one, she had the consolation of being told that she was one of the evils sent into the world by the gods, to punish men for the sin of Prometheus. The other was disease.

This is a sorry picture, but it reflects the usual Greek attitude toward women, and cannot be ignored, much as we should like to honor the sense of justice, and the heart as well as the intellect of men of so brilliant a race.

II

There is another side, however, upon which it is more pleasing to dwell. By some curious paradox, the Hellenic poets, who delighted in saying such disagreeable things, have given us many of the finest types of womanhood, though these women lived only in the imagination of great men, or so near the border-land of shadows as to be half mythical. It may be said to the credit of Homer that he never joined in the popular chorus of abuse. His women are not permitted to forget their subjection, but the high-born ones at least are treated with gentle courtesy, and he indulges in no superfluous flings at their inferiority or general worthlessness. Many of them hold places of honor and power. These women of a primitive age, who stand at the portals of the young world luminous and smiling, or draped in the stately dignity of antique goddesses, still retain the distinction of classic ideals. They look out from the misty dawn of things with veiled faces, but we know that love shone from their soft eyes, and words of wisdom fell from their rosy lips.

The vulgar of my sex I most exceed
In real power, when most humane my deed,

says the gentle Penelope, as, tear-dimmed and constant, she weaves and unweaves the many-colored threads, and waits for her royal lord, who basks in the smiles of Calypso over the sea, and forgets her until he tires of the fascinating siren and begins to long for his home. If there was a trace of artfulness in the innocent device of the faithful wife, it was all the weapon she had to save her honor.

There is no lovelier picture of radiant girlhood than the graceful Nausicaä, as she takes the silken reins in her white hands, and drives across the plains in the first flush of the morning to help her maids “wash their fair garments in the limpid streams.” When the snowy robes are laid in the sun to dry, they play a game of ball, this daughter of kings leading all the rest. We hear the echo of her silvery laughter, and see the flash of her shining veil as her light feet fly over the greensward. But the dignity of the princess asserts itself with the forethought and sympathy of the woman in the discreet words with which she greets the destitute stranger, and modestly directs him to her royal mother. Her swift eye notes his air of distinction, his courteous address, and she naïvely wishes in her heart that the gods would send her such a husband. It is to Arête that she bids him go, to the beloved queen who shares the throne of Alcinous with “honors never before given to a woman.” Simple is this gentle lady and gracious, whether she sits in her stately palace working rare designs in crimson and purple wools, or gives wise counsel to her husband, or goes abroad among the people, who adore her as a goddess,

To heal divisions, to relieve the oppressed,
In virtue rich, in blessing others, blessed.

A more touching though less radiant figure is Andromache, who shows no trace of weakness as she folds her child to her bosom, after the tender farewell of her brave husband, and goes home, sad and prophetic, to “ply her melancholy loom,” and brood over the hopelessness of her coming fate.

These are the great Homeric types, women of simple and noble outlines, untouched by the fires of passion, wise, loyal, efficient, and brave, but rich in sympathy and all sweet affections. The central figures of the fireside, with needle and distaff in hand, they were not without a fine intelligence which, after the fashion of primitive times, found its field in the every-day problems of life. The mysteries of knowledge and speculation had not opened to them.

There is no fairer thing
Than when the lord and lady with one soul
One home possess.

This was the poet’s domestic ideal, and the ages have not brought a better one, though they have brought us many things to make it more beautiful.

But what shall we say of Helen, the alluring child of fancy and romance, who stands as an eternal type of the beauty that led captive the Hellenic world? Even this fair-haired daughter of the gods, who set nations at variance, and did so many things not to be commended, gathers a subtle charm from the domestic setting which the poet’s art has given her. She sits serenely in the midst of the woes she has brought, teaching her maidens to work after strange patterns, and weaving her own tragic story in the golden web. It does not occur to her that she is very wicked; indeed, she thinks regretfully that, after all, she is worthy of a braver man. The tears that fall do not dim her brightness. Gray-haired men go to their death under the spell of her divine loveliness, but forget to chide. She is the helpless victim of Aphrodite, who is indulgently charged with all her frailties. Twice ten years have gone since she sailed away from Sparta, but when her forgiving husband takes her home she has lost none of that mystic beauty which is “never stale and never old.” She takes her place as naturally as if she had not left it, plays again the pleasant rôle of hostess, and looks with care after the comfort of her guests. When Telemachus goes to see her, and recalls the uncertain fate of the wandering heroes, she gives him the “star-bright” veil her own hands have wrought to help dry the tears she has caused to flow. But she is troubled by no superfluous grief. What the gods send she tranquilly accepts.

When the poets began to analyze, the glamour of this witching goddess was lost, and she became a sinning, soul-destroying woman, a human Circe that lured men to ruin. But the Greeks did not like to see their idols slandered or broken, so in later times they gave her a shadowy existence on the banks of the Nile, where we catch a last glimpse of her, sitting unruffled among the palms, in all the splendor of her radiant beauty, twining wreaths of lotus-flowers for her golden hair, and learning rare secrets of Eastern looms, while men fought and died across the sea for a phantom. It is not upon these fanciful pictures, however, that we like to dwell. The Helen who lives and breathes for us is the Helen of Homer, fair and sweet, more sinned against than sinning, pitying the sorrows she cannot cure, but saved by her matchless charm from the chilling frost of mortal censure.

These women of Homer were mostly wives and daughters of kings. Whether it was because he had been greeted with gentle words and caressing smiles by the fair patricians to whom he recited his verses that he painted them in such glowing colors, or because the women of the heroic age really had the unstudied grace and simple dignity that spring from conscious freedom, we cannot know. But it is certain that the measure of honor and liberty which they enjoyed was a privilege of caste rather than of sex, though it gave them a virile quality, and added a fresh luster of spontaneity to their domestic virtues.

The lesser women had small consideration. We find the captives, even of royal descent, tossed about among their masters with no regard to their wishes, or rights—if they had any, which seems doubtful. The gentle Briseïs, a high priest’s daughter, and as potent a factor in the final disasters of the Greeks as the divine Helen herself, was the merest puppet in the hands of the so-called heroes who quarreled over her, and Chryseïs was only saved from the same fate by the kind interference of Apollo. The bitterest drop in the cup of Hector was the thought of his wife led away weeping by some “mail-clad Achaian,” with no one to hear her cries or save her from the hopeless fate of weaving and carrying water at the bidding of another. The women of the people fared little better, if as well. Ulysses had no hesitation in putting to death a dozen of his wife’s maids whose conduct did not please him, and he threatened his devoted nurse Euryclea with a like fate, if she revealed the secret of his identity, which she had been the first to divine.

III

It is difficult to comprehend the attitude of the dramatists of the golden age toward women. They have left many fine and powerful types; they have created heroines of singular moral grandeur and a superb quality of courage that led them to face death or the bitterest fate as serenely as if they were composing themselves to pleasant dreams; but there was no insult or injustice too great to be heaped upon their sex.

There is not anything, nor will be ever,
Than woman worse, let what will fall on man,

says Sophocles. Æschylus, who is, on the whole, the most kindly disposed, makes Eteocles call the Theban maidens a “brood intolerable,” “loathed of the wise,” and emphasizes his opinion in these flattering lines:

Ne’er be it mine, in ill estate or good,
To dwell together with the race of women.

Euripides strikes the bitterest note of all, and sums up his verdict with crushing force:

Dire is the violence of ocean waves,
And dire the blast of rivers and hot fires,
And dire is want and dire are countless things,
But nothing is so dire and dread as woman.
No painting could express her dreadfulness,
No words describe it. If a god made woman
And fashioned her, he was for men the artist
Of woes unnumbered, and their deadly foe.

And this in spite of such characters as Alcestis and Iphigenia, who, from a man’s point of view, certainly deserved an apotheosis! It is said that Euripides was unfortunate in his wives, which may account, in part, for his cynical temper. One might suspect that the author of such a diatribe gave ample cause for disaffection, and that he had no more than his deserts. But he seems to have avenged himself, as smaller men have done, by railing at the whole sex. It is easy enough to understand the portrayal of a Phædra or a Medea in dark colors, and one can forgive the mad ravings of despair. But so many needless words of general contempt signify more than a dramatic purpose. To-day they would not be possible in a civilized country. The drama reflects the dominant sentiments of the time, if not always those of the author, and the frequency of such ungracious, not to say virulent, attacks proves the complaisance of a Greek audience and the absence of all consideration for women. Even Aristophanes takes Euripides to task for being a woman-hater, and turns upon him the sharpest points of his satire; but he has himself added the last touch of abuse, which only misses its aim for modern ears by its incredible coarseness. He gives to women all of the lowest vices, without a redeeming virtue. Their presence at the comedy was quite out of the question.

One is tempted to multiply these quotations, as they put in so vivid a light the injustice suffered by women when the expression of such sentiments was habitual. The saddest feature of it is that men abused them for the ignorance and frivolity which they had themselves practically compelled. The dramatists lived and wrote in an age when men had reached a higher plane of knowledge from which orthodox women were rigidly excluded. The natural consequence of this exclusion was a total lack of companionship, which sent the Attic woman into a species of slavery, while her husband found his society in a class that was better educated and more interesting, but less respectable. This state of things was reflected in Athenian literature, especially in the comedies, and it doubtless led to the general disdain of women so freely expressed in the tragedies. To reconcile such an attitude with the strong character of many of the women portrayed is not easy, unless we take them as object-lessons to their sex in the honor and glory of self-sacrifice.

In the glamour the poets have cast about their great creations, and the marvelous power with which they have made these women live for us, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that the moral force of the best of them is centered in the superhuman immolation of themselves for the benefit of men, to whom it never occurs that any consideration whatever is due to these innocent sufferers. They are subject to men, and ready to lay down their lives, if need be to make the world comfortable and pleasant for them; yet they have only sorrow for themselves.

More than a thousand women is one man
Worthy to see the light of life,

says the young Iphigenia, as she folds her saffron veil about her, and goes to her doom with words of love and forgiveness, praying for the cruel masters she dies to save. The essence of her training, as of her religion, lies in this meekly uttered sentiment, though the fated child pleads for pity, since “the sorriest life is better than the noblest death.” Strong men, among whom are her father and Achilles, the heroes of the ancient world, stand calmly by and let her die. The powerful lover, who will give his life later to avenge the death of his friend, is sorry to lose so sweet a flower for his wife, but he makes no real effort to save her. When she is told that the gods have decreed her sacrifice for the good of her country, the cry of nature is silenced, the touching appeal is stilled. She rises to a divine height of courage, and is the consoler rather than the consoled.

Not less pathetic is the fate of Alcestis, though it is a voluntary one. She robes herself for the tomb as tranquilly as if she were going out on a message of mercy. With sad dignity she crowns with myrtle the altar at which she prays, but not until she takes leave of the familiar room so consecrated by love and happiness do the tears begin to fall. This tender wife, who freely gives her life to save her husband, does not falter as she passionately embraces her weeping children, and bids a kind farewell to her pitying servants. The only thing she asks for herself is to see the sun once more, and she tries to inspire this selfish, posing, half-hearted husband with her own fortitude, as her spirit “glides on light wing down the silent paths of sleep.” One cannot help wondering if she never had a misgiving that the man who could ask his wife to comfort him for his unspeakable misery in letting her die for him was not worth dying for. But the Greek women had been long trained in the school of passive suffering, and it never seemed to occur to them that it was not quite in the nature of things for the weaker half of the human family to have a monopoly of the sacrifices. It was a part of their destiny; the gods so willed it. Men looked upon it as a comfortable arrangement for themselves, that had good moral results for women. To-day we are inclined to ask why a discipline that is good for women, and tends toward their moral perfection, is not also good for men, who have a like need of being perfected.

But, in spite of rational theories, the world’s heart still thrills to a generous emotion so overpowering as to drown all consideration of self, whether or not it is faulty in its mundane wisdom or its arithmetic. And this it is which casts so lasting a glamour over the women who loom out of the twilight of that far-off time, in noble proportions that dwarf the selfish, arrogant men with whom they are mated. They rise to the dignity of goddesses in their divine pity and courage, while the great Achilles, the masculine ideal of the Greeks, weeps like a child, and sends a generation of men to sleep on the plains of Troy, because he cannot have what he wishes.

Yet it is in the minds of men that these women were conceived, and it is impossible to suppose that they had not at least some faint counterpart in real life, though possibly men, and women as well, are apt to make ideals of what they think ought to be rather than of what is. But why did the Greek poets cast such ridicule and dishonor upon the sex which they have shown capable of such supreme devotion and such exalted virtues?

There is a touch of justice in the bitter scorn with which the blind Œdipus speaks of his sons who

Keep house at home like maidens in their prime,

while his daughters wear themselves to death for him and for his sorrows.

No women they, but men in will to toil.

Perhaps Antigone is a trifle too coldly perfect, too faultlessly wise—a tacit reflection upon every-day human nature, that likes its ease, and counts the cost of its renunciations. We look for a trace of weakness, a warm burst of living tenderness. But duty is shy like love, and chary of expression. “I do not love a friend who loves in words,” is the cry of her steadfast soul. There she stands, in the still majesty of a sorrow that lies too deep for tears, supreme among the classic types of the world as a model of filial devotion. Cordelia, true and loyal as she is, and tender at heart, does not approach her in strength and dignity. But the duty of the Greek heroine does not end with her father’s death. She lays down her life at last that the false-hearted brother, who has given her no gentle consideration in her days of helplessness and despair, may not lie unburied on the plains of Thebes, and so wander without rest in Hades. She laments the lost pleasures of living. No husband or children are to be hers. Yet no enthusiasm of passion or romance tempers this “cold statue’s fine-wrought grace.” The man she was to marry is secondary. Love, in our sense, does not enter as a motive power into her life, but her human need of sympathy is shown in a few pathetic words:

And yet, of all my friends,
Not one bewails my fate;
No kindly tear is shed.

There are a few women of colossal wickedness who serve as foils, or shadows in the picture. Their very sins are a part of the overmastering strength that defies its hard limitations. “Of all things, as many as have life and intellect, we women are the most wretched race; we must first purchase a husband with excess of money, then receive him as our lord,” is the bitter protest of the wronged Medea, and the key-note to her tragical destiny. Clytemnestra says that she has always been trained to obey, but she towers far above her warrior husband in force as in crime. She resents his unfaithfulness; she does not forgive him for the inhuman sacrifice of their innocent daughter; she meets him on his own ground. It is appalling, the stern and pitiless passion with which her untamed spirit, spurred on by the white-hot hate which is often a great love reversed, tramples upon every human impulse, and sweeps a whole race with her to destruction. The clash of elemental forces is there, even though the responsibility is shifted upon the gods, who use these frail mortals as blind instruments in their inscrutable plans.

But these monsters of crime are few, and seem to throw into stronger relief the self-forgetful women who exalt their inferior position, and bend their heads to the yoke with such stately dignity that they seem to command even in obeying. For, in spite of the important part assigned them in the world of affairs as well as at the fireside, they are constantly reminded of their little worth. “Let not women counsel,” is the advice of men to the wisest of them.

Woman, know
That silence is a woman’s noblest part,

says the ill-tempered Ajax to his amiable wife. This gentle Tecmessa wishes to die with him, for “Why should I wish to live if you are dead?” He only tells her to mind her own affairs and be silent. Telemachus orders his faithful mother not to meddle with men’s business, but it was precisely because she did meddle with it, and tried, by various simple arts, to bring order into the chaos men had raised, that his royal father had any home to return to, or any kingdom to leave to his ungracious son.

IV

So far as we can gather from Homer, women of the better sort had a degree of consideration in the heroic age which they lost at a later period. When men fought or tilled the soil, it was in the natural order of things that they should stay at home to look after their children and households. The division of duties was fair enough. In a reign of brute force they needed protection, and though it was pretty well settled that men were born to rule and women to be ruled, there was evidently a great deal of pleasant companionship in family life. Compared with the seclusion of the Oriental harem, the position of these women was one of freedom, and it lasted to historic times. Their supreme distinction was a moral one. Books they had not. Of literature nothing was known beyond the verses and tales of wandering minstrels. Art was little more than a handicraft. If men worked in marble or in metal, women designed patterns for weaving and embroidery. Men had not begun to put their thoughts or speculations into enduring form, and women were not excluded from a large part of their lives. But so perfectly did many of them realize the world’s ideal of feminine virtues that we ask no more. They stand upon pedestals, like the masterpieces of Greek sculpture, noble in their simplicity and lovely in the repose of their surpassing strength.

But the dramatists reflected in a thousand ways the altered spirit of an age in which good women had no visible part. Their immortal heroines are equally strong and instinct with vitality, though less simple and of severer mold, but they are revered from afar as the goddesses were, while real women are a target for abuse and ridicule. It is to no rare and perishable beauty, no fleeting grace, no intellectual brilliancy, that they owe their eternal charm, but to their moral greatness, their strength of sacrifice. These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse destiny or of their own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. She was made to be loved, to command; all others were made to serve. The Greeks adored beauty; they lived in it, they created it. Here lay their pride; here more than once they found their Nemesis. But virtue they gave a place apart, as they did the wise Athena, who towered in golden isolation over the Attic divinities. It had no share in the joy of existence.

Beneath the glad pæans of heroes we hear at intervals, across the ages, the clear voices of women chanting a miserere in an undertone of sorrow or despair. Doubtless the poets saw and felt the tragical side of their lives, but tradition had the inevitability of fate, as it has had in other times. They have given us great and lonely ideals of womanhood, but a somber picture of the place held by living women in the Athenian world.

SAPPHO AND THE FIRST WOMAN’S CLUB

· Golden Age of Lyric Poetry ·
· The Mythical and the Real Sappho ·
· Her Poems ·
· Contrast with Hebrew Singers ·
· Poet of Nature and Passion ·
· The First Woman’s Club ·
· Æolian and Doric Poetesses ·
· Honors to the Genius of Hellenic Women ·

I

A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist, singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal—all this was the Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its finest representative. Before her no woman had appeared in a distinctly literary rôle, so far as we know. To-day she still stands supreme in her own field.

This “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho,” who sang so divinely, and vanished so theatrically from Leucadia’s “rock of woe,” was long veiled in the mists of romance. The tragical muse pictured in flowing draperies, with a crown of laurel on her head and a lyre in her hand, chanting her swan-song before cooling her heart of flame in the blue sea at her feet, was as intangible to us as one of Fra Angelico’s angels. She looked out of a land of mystery and shadows, with nothing human about her save that she loved, and suffered, and died. “Do thou, gentle Love, place wings beneath me as I fall, that I may not be the reproach of the Leucadian waves,” is her pathetic prayer, and here she fades from our sight.

But it has been fairly settled that this romantic story was a dream; that Phaon was only a mythical Adonis; that Sappho did not follow him across the sea, did not die of love, and never took the fatal leap at all. The sentimental tourist who sighs over her melancholy fate to-day, as he passes the bare white cliffs of Santa Maura, so long consecrated to tragedies of love and sorrow, pays his sympathetic tribute to a phantom. She went to Sicily, it seems, but not for love. It is supposed that she was exiled. There were political conspiracies for which men were banished, and she may have written revolutionary songs. Possibly she held too radical opinions on the privileges of her sex. But all this is the purest surmise. In any case, her offense could not have been a grave one, as she returned in a few years to Mytilene, where she was adored by a fickle public as the glory of her native city, and honored with altars and temples after her death. Her face was stamped upon coins—“though she was a woman,” said Aristotle. The outlines are clear and strong, with the virile quality so marked in most statues of Greek women. She was also represented, with Alcæus, on a vase of the next century, as not only beautiful, but tall and stately.

A thousand years afterward a statue of her is said to have been one of the ornaments of the gymnasium at Byzantium. But coin and bust and statue give us many faces. Which was the real one? We are more familiar with the ideal Sappho in the modern portrait in which Alma-Tadema has so subtly caught the prophetic light of her soul, her eager intellect, her unconscious grace, and the slumbering passion in her eloquent eyes.

But recent critics tell us that even her beauty was a fiction of the imagination. Does she not say of herself, in the burning lines of Ovid, that she was brown and of low stature, though her name filled all lands? Or was it the sweet humility of love that made her own attractions seem to her slender and insufficient? She had been dead six hundred years or so when Ovid wrote, and his knowledge could not have been infallible.

Men of her own time called her the “beautiful Sappho,” the “flower of the graces,” and Greek standards of beauty included height and stateliness. Perhaps they were under the magic spell of her genius, and indulged in glowing figures of speech. At all events, modern scholars are more literal, and they have mostly decided that she was a small, dark woman, of noble birth, who was early left a widow with one fair daughter, “Cleïs, the beloved, with a form like a golden flower.” This was also the name of her own mother. One of her brothers held the honorable office of cup-bearer; the other went to Egypt, and, much to the displeasure of his gifted sister, married a woman of more charms than discretion, for whom he had paid a large ransom. This famous beauty of Naucratis became very rich, and, possibly by way of atonement for her sins, made a generous offering at the temple of Delphi. It was even said that she immortalized herself by building the third pyramid; but these tales, whether true or not, have been relegated to the region of myths. We learn from Sappho herself that she quarreled with her brother on account of this mésalliance. These are scant materials on which to base a life, but they include about all the facts we have of

That mighty songstress, whose unrivaled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers.

We do not even know when or where or how she died, though epitaphs in the strain of these flattering and prosaic lines are numerous.

If her personality is veiled to us, still less do we know what manner of woman she was. The Attic comedians said unpleasant things about her a century after she died, and no one lived who could dispute them. Unfortunately, no infallible certificate of character can be found to protect a name that has been only a historic memory two or three thousand years. It is certain, however, that Æolian women had an honored place in society and literature. They formed a center of intellectual light in which the brilliant Sappho reigned supreme, and it was no unusual thing to see them at banquets and festivals with men. A well-born Athenian woman would have lost the rather illusory privileges of her position by such freedom. She was decorously ignorant and stayed at home. It was a foregone conclusion in Athens that a woman who was educated and a poet could not be respectable, and if the facts were against this conclusion, so much the worse for the facts.

Hence it was quite natural that Sappho, who did not go into seclusion or hide her light, should be decried by the satirists who had never seen her. A hundred years had sufficed to dim the incidents of her life, and left them free to invent any romance they chose. Her supposed love-affairs were a fruitful theme. That men died before she was born, or were born after she died, were impertinent details which were not held to interfere in the least with their tender relations toward her. It is true that she wrote with a pen dipped in fire, but poems and tales of passion are not held even to-day as evidence against the fair fame of the author, whatever might be thought of her good taste. The Greek standards of morality were, at best, far from ours, and the frank naturalism of that age would be likely to shock our sense of decorum. But there is no indication that Sappho fell below these standards, and there is much to show that she rose above them. “I love delicacy,” she writes, “and for me love has the sun’s splendor and beauty.” Alcæus, her fellow-poet and rival, addresses her as “pure, sweetly smiling Sappho.” When he grows too ardent in his love, she rebukes him with gentle dignity: “Hadst thou felt desire for things good or noble, and had not thy tongue framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine eyes, but thou hadst spoken honestly about it.” And why did she feel her brother’s disgrace so keenly if her own life was open to reproach?

We gather from herself that she was simple, amiable, and sunny, with a Greek love of life and all that pertains to it. “I am not of revengeful temper,” she says, “but have a childlike mind.” To this naïve confession she adds a choice bit of wisdom: “When anger spreads through the breast, guard thy tongue from barking idly.” She tells her daughter not to mourn for her, as “a poet’s home is not a fit place for lamentation.” In the spirit of her age and race, she insists that “death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die.”

Whatever her character and personal history may have been, we know that she wrote perfect lyrics with the spark of immortality in them, and gathered about her in the sunny island of Lesbos a circle of educated women who devoted themselves to the study of music, poetry, and the arts of refined living. Her genius has been recognized by poets, philosophers, and critics, as well as by simpler people who felt in her verse the “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” She was the “divine Muse” of Plato, and shared the lyric throne with Pindar. Aristotle quoted her, and the austere Solon was so charmed with one of her odes that he said he could not die until he had learned it. Strabo writes that “at no period on record has any woman been known who compared with her in the least degree as a poet.” Horace and Catullus imitated her, Ovid paraphrased her, but no one has caught the essence of her fiery spirit. Plutarch likens her to the “heart of a volcano.” Longinus called her celebrated ode, “not a passion, but a congress of passions.” Modern men have tried to put her golden-winged, fire-tipped words into another tongue, and turned with despair from the task. It is like trying to seize the light that blazes in the heart of the diamond, or the fiery tints that hide in the opal. Perhaps Swinburne has best caught the spirit and the music of

Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity.

But even this exquisite artist in words says: “Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed.”

There were nine volumes of her works in the days of Horace. To-day scarcely more than two hundred lines survive. Besides the two immortal odes, we have only fragments, gems scattered here and there through the writers of antiquity. To the everlasting discredit of an ignorant and fanatical age, the fathers denounced her, and the Byzantine emperors or the ascetic monks of a later time burned these so-called relics of paganism, to supply their place with books of devotion and lives of the saints. When the Hellenic spirit woke again, after a sleep of more than a thousand years, it was too late. These poems had perished with many monumental works of the intellect, and scholars thought their lives well spent if they found a line or two from the lost treasures.

But what was the life from which Sappho sprang, that she could reach the topmost bough of fame at a single flight? The lucid note, the tropical passion, the musical flow—these nature might give; but where did she learn the fine sense of proportion, the perfection of metrical form, the mastery of the secrets of language, which placed her at the head of the lyric poets of Greece? The voices which might have told us are silent. Sparta was making heroic men and women, not literature. Athens was struggling through her stormy youth, and pluming her wings for the highest flight of all. The great Hebrew poetry was contemporary with Sappho, but she shows no trace of its influence. If she ever saw or heard it, her spirit was utterly alien to it. Still less had she in common with the inspired woman who led the armies of Israel to victory, six or seven centuries before, and chanted in stately measure the immortal song of their triumphs. It may be noted here that it was a woman who fired the hearts of these wandering people to brave deeds, when men drew back, timid and disheartened; it was a woman who went before them into battle; and it was a woman who broke into that impassioned poem which has come down to us across the ages as one of the great martial hymns of the world. But Deborah, the soldier, poet, prophetess, judge, and minstrel, never walked in the flowery paths of beauty and love. Her virile soul rose on the wings of a sublime faith, far above the things of sense. Behind that chorus of joy and exultation lay the long-baffled hopes, aspirations, and energies of an oppressed people, but it celebrated the apotheosis of force. It was a barbaric song, wild and revengeful even in its splendid imagery and patriotic fervor. Miriam took her timbrel, and sang in the same strain of power and majesty, inspired by the same soaring imagination. But we find no touch of a woman’s pity or tenderness in these pæans of victory. Their note is strong and exultant, alive with the lofty enthusiasm of a religious race in which the passion for art and beauty was not yet born. Sappho had caught nothing from these singers of an earlier time. She does not live in the bracing air of great ideals, nor does she dwell upon any vexed moral problems, after the manner of later poets. She is simply human, and strikes a personal note, the charm of which is unfailing, and will be fresh as long as flowers bloom, or men and women live and love.

This sweet-voiced singer seems to have risen full-fledged with the dawn, and her notes were liquid and clear as the song of the lark that soars out of the morning mists, and makes the sky vocal with melody. The freshness of the woods and the wild freedom of the air are in them. She loves the flowers, the running streams, the silver moon, the “golden-sandaled dawn,” the “dear, glad angel of the spring, the nightingale.” Hesperus, fairest of stars, “brings all that bright morning scattered,” and smiles on “dark-eyed sleep, child of night.” Again she says, “The stars about the fair moon hide their bright faces when she lights up all the earth with silver.” Was it the music of her voice that the doves heard “when their hearts turned cold and they dropped their wings”? She sings the praise of the purple hyacinth, the blushing apple-blossom, and the pale Lesbian rose, which she loves best of all. Dica is bidden to twine wreaths, “for even the blessed Graces look kindlier on a flowery sacrifice, and turn their faces from those who lack garlands.” In the garden of the nymphs, “the cool water gurgles through apple-boughs, and slumber streams from quivering leaves.” To this passionate love of nature, so vividly told in rare and exquisite figures and in phrases “shot with a thousand hues,” she adds a sensibility that responds to every breath that passes. “I flutter like a child after her mother,” is her cry. She likens a bird to a flower that grows in a garden and has nothing to fear from the storms. A woman alone is like a wild flower which no one takes care of. She touches every phase of love from the divine tenderness of girlhood to the wild passion that shakes the soul, “a wind on the mountains falling on oaks.” Her words flash and burn with the heart-consuming fire of her race. The lines in which she entreats the “star-throned Aphrodite” to have pity on her anguish, glow with a white heat. The swift-winged doves had brought the fickle goddess once before to soothe her pain with sweet promises and an immortal smile. Will she not come again and lift the ache from her tortured soul, and give her what she asks?

The intensity of passion reaches its climax in the ode to Anactoria. Simple as it is, the vocabulary of “bitter-sweet” emotion is exhausted. In her most impassioned verses, our own Mrs. Browning does not quite forget to reflect about her love. She sets it forth in subtly woven thoughts, and lets it filter through her mind until it takes the color of it. Sappho sings of passion pure and artless. She does not think about it, she does not analyze it. It possesses her heart and imagination, and she tells it so simply, so sincerely, and so truly, that the familiar story never loses its charm. She sang in the childhood of the world, when people felt more than they thought, when love was a sensation, a joy, a passion, a pain, not a sentiment. If she did not spiritualize her theme, she purified it of the coarseness which made the love-songs of men, before and afterward, unfit for a delicate ear. This first touch of a woman in literature was to refine it, though it was many centuries before she had the power to lead men to take love from the exclusive domain of the senses and give it a soul.

II

But it is not alone as a singer that Sappho has come down to us. She was the leader of an intellectual movement among women that was without a parallel in classic times. We may greet her as not only the first of woman poets, but as the founder of the first “woman’s club” known to us. It is not certain that it had either a constitution or by-laws, and it discussed poetry and esthetics instead of science and social economics. But the measure of the intellect is not so much what we discuss as the quality of thought we bring into the discussion. It is easy enough to talk platitudes about literature or philosophy, and not so easy as one might imagine to talk wisely and well about poetry, or manners, or the art of living; and it is easier to do any of these things than it is to write what is worth talking about. The women who came to Sappho from the isles of the Ægean and the far hills of Greece seem to have been more intent upon writing poems than talking about them. There is no trace of brilliant conversation, or critical papers, or gathered sheaves of the knowledge that comes so freely under our own hand. Unfortunately, there was no secretary in this primitive club to take notes for posterity, or, if there was, the records have been lost. We know little of its sayings, though there are scattered traces of its doings. A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,—a verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,—and that is all. Even these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual side. Of the quality of its work we cannot judge, as there is little of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners. When they married, she wrote their bridal odes. These she sang with the lyre, and one of her minor claims to fame was her invention of the plectrum, which brought out the full resources of this instrument. For Timas, who died unmarried, she wrote a touching elegy, which was sung at her tomb by the maidens, who cut off their curls as a token of sorrow.

The most gifted of Sappho’s friends was Erinna, who died at nineteen, leaving among other things a poem of three hundred verses, which was said to deserve a place beside the epics of Homer. She sang of the sorrows of a maiden whose mother compelled her to spin when she wished to serve the Muses. There is also a tradition that she wrote an epitaph for a companion of “birth and lineage high,” who died on her wedding day, and “changed bridal songs to sound of sob and tear.” She was thought to surpass her teacher in hexameters. Sappho reproved her for being so scornful, and this is all the trait we have of this precocious child of genius, who preferred poetry to spinning. Her own epitaph speaks for itself:

These are Erinna’s songs; how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years.
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equaled hers?

The only thing about Andromeda of which we are sure is that she dressed badly. “What woman ever charmed thy mind who wore a graceless dress, or did not know how to draw her garments about her ankles?” says Sappho to this formidable rival who stole away from her the fickle heart of Atthis. Of the brilliant Gorgo she grew tired. It is supposed that these two were at the head of other clubs or schools. Damophyla wrote a hymn to Artemis, the patron goddess of pure-souled maidens, which was modeled after Sappho and had great praise in its day, but no fragment of it is left.

“The fair-haired Lesbian,” so famed as the poet of nature and passion, was not without a wise philosophy of life, and she assumes the rôle of mentor with pitiless candor. “He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good will soon be fair,” is her motto; but she tells Mnasidica that her “gloomy temper spoils her, though she has a more beautiful form than the tender Gyrinna.” Her house is devoted to the service of the Muses and must be cheerful, but she shuts out of an honorable immortality those who prefer worldly fortune to the pleasures of the intellect. To a rich woman without education she says: “Where thou diest there wilt thou lie, and no one will remember thy name in times to come, because thou hast no share in the roses of Pieria. Inglorious wilt thou wander about in Hades and flit among its dark shades.” She does not forget the finer graces of character, and evidently realizes the insidious fascination of material things. A moralist of to-day might be expected to tell us that “wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest,” but we are not apt to credit the gifted singers of the ancient world with so much ethical insight, least of all the women of a sensuous and passionate race, which loved before all things beauty and the pleasures of life.

These few touches of wisdom, satire, and criticism, relieved by the love of Sappho for the friends and pupils to whom she is a model, an adviser, and an inspiration, throw a passing side-light on a group of clever women who flit like phantoms across the pages of history, most of them names and nothing more. They are of interest in showing us that the women of ages ago had the same aspirations that we have to-day, together with the same faults, the same virtues, and the same griefs, though they had not learned to moralize their sensations or intellectualize their passions. They show us, too, another phase of the elusive being who dazzled the world in its youth, leaving a few records traced in flame, and charged with an ever-baffling secret for all coming generations.

“Men, I think, will remember us hereafter,” she says with subtle foresight, a line that Swinburne has so gracefully expanded in words taken in part from her own lips:

I, Sappho, shall be one with all these things,
With all high things forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
With gladness and much sadness and long love.

III

The little coterie that wrote and talked and worked in the direction of finer ideals of life and manners, under the influence of the first woman poet of the world, has made the island of Lesbos, with its varying charm of sea and sky, and beautiful gardens, and singing birds, and sparkling fountains, and white cliffs outlined like sculpture in the crystalline air, luminous for all time. Of its four more or less famous poets, three were women, but Sappho has overshadowed all the rest. The very atmosphere woke the imagination, and made their hearts sing aloud with love and joy, varied by an occasional note of sorrow and pain. They came from all lands, these gifted maidens, to sit at the feet of Sappho, and to carry back to their distant homes the spirit of poesy and song which inspired so many Hellenic women to brave deeds as well as to tender and heroic words. But the passion of southern seas became a religious enthusiasm in the sheltered and somber plains of Bœotia, where the lives of women had been so bare and hard, and Hesiod with his fellow-poets had given them such cold consolation. The songs of love were turned to processional hymns chanted by white-robed virgins as they brought offerings to the shrines of their gods.

It may have been the fame of Sappho that fired the genius of Myrtis and Corinna. Possibly some dark-eyed maiden had come back from Lesbos to spread the cult of knowledge and beauty, to found other esthetic clubs which should give a new impulse to women’s lives. But when we try to give a living form to these famous poets, we grasp at shadows. We simply know that they lived and sang and had their little day of glory, with grand tombs at the end, and statues in various parts of Greece. They were teachers of Pindar, and Corinna is said to have defeated him five times in poetic contests at Thebes. Several centuries later there was still at Tanagra a picture representing her in the act of binding a fillet about her beautiful head, probably in token of these victories. Five crowns on her tomb also told the story. She was the friend and critic of the great lyric poet, but he said some unkind things of his successful rival, and insisted that the prize was due to her beauty rather than her genius. In spite of this, he went to her for counsel. She had advised him to use the Greek myths in his poems, and he did it so lavishly that she wittily told him to “sow with the hand and not pour out of a sack.” She was not quite generous, however, to her other friend, who also won a prize in the same manner. She says, “I blame the clear-toned Myrtis that she, a woman born, should enter the lists with Pindar.” Why it was not proper for a sister poet who had taught both of them to do what she did herself, is not clear. She was called the first of the nine lyrical muses, who were the earthly counterparts of the “celestial nine.” Myrtis was another. As the immortal Maids who dwelt on the slopes of Helicon were apt to visit their rivals with summary vengeance of much more serious character, perhaps their mortal representatives ought to be forgiven for a shade of jealousy so delicately implied.

Corinna left five books of poems, but small trace of them remains. Many of her verses were sung by maidens at religious festivals. Her modest niche in the temple of fame she owes mainly to her victories over Pindar, though she was second only to Sappho. Why her work, which was crowned with so many laurels, has not lived beside his, is one of the mysteries of buried ages. Perhaps it was because she made use of purely local legends and the local dialect, to which many thought she owed her success in her own day.

This wave of feminine genius that passed over the hills and valleys of Greece spent itself in little more than a century on Doric soil. The last of the lyrical muses were Praxilla and Telesilla. We have a faint glimpse of the first at Sicyon, where she lived, and ancient critics gave her a place by the side of Anacreon. She drew her inspiration largely from mythology, and sang successfully on that favorite theme of poetic maidens, the death of Adonis. In the most critical age of Greece she was honored with a statue by Lysippus, which may be taken as sufficient proof that she was much more than a writer of sentimental verses.

More noted was Telesilla, the poet and heroine of Argos, an antique Joan of Arc, whose exaltation took a poetic form instead of a religious one. A curious little story, mythical or otherwise, is related of her. She was very ill and consulted the oracle, which told her to devote herself to the Muses. This species of mind-cure proved more effective than medicine, and she recovered under the magic of music and poetry. But she had the spirit of an Amazon as well as the genius of a poet. At a crisis in the war with Sparta, she armed the women, and manned the walls with slaves too young or too old to fight. The Spartans thought it discreditable to kill the women, and disgraceful to be beaten by them, so they retreated. The event was commemorated by an annual festival at which men appeared in feminine attire. Many centuries afterward a statue of Telesilla was still standing on a pillar in front of the temple of Aphrodite at Argos. She held in her hand a helmet which she was about to put on her head, and several volumes of poetry were lying at her feet. Among her themes were the fated daughters of the weeping Niobe; she also wrote famous hymns to Artemis and Apollo. In spite of her allegiance to the Muses, she was more conspicuous for her service to Ares, who was henceforth worshiped at Argos as the patron deity of women.

The poetry of the Æolians was largely inspired by love, or a religion of beauty. But the Doric genius was not a lyrical one, and the passionate personal note which made the charm of Sappho and her contemporaries was lost in stirring martial strains. Women ceased to write or to be known at all in literature until a later time, when they dipped into philosophy a little, especially in the Dorian colonies, where they were educated and held in great consideration. Pythagoras had many feminine followers, and his school at Crotona was continued after his death by his wife Theano and a daughter who had assisted him. But most of them live, if at all, only as names, or in the reflected light of famous men whose disciples they were.

IV

At no other time in the history of the world has the poetry of women reached the height or the honor it attained in this first flowering of their intellect and imagination. One may doubtless take with a shade of reservation the “female Homers,” like Anyta, of whom we have only a few epigrams, but there is a dim and rather vague tradition of seventy-six women poets in a scattered and by no means large population. In the revival of poetry during the Renaissance, there were about sixty, and none of them had the same quality of perfection which we find in Sappho. No one claims that we have equaled her to-day on her own ground, however superior our achievements may be in other directions.

That the Æolian women did so much with so little, and in spite of their limited advantages, is the best proof of their inborn gifts. Mediocre talents do not thrive in so adverse a soil, though this outburst of mental vigor belongs to a time when women had a degree of freedom and honor which for some reason they lost in the golden age of Athens. But the books they wrote were not printed, the manuscript copies were limited, most of them were lost with other classic works, and the few that escaped the pitiless fingers of time were destroyed by fanatics and iconoclasts. Yet one woman shines across twenty-five centuries as a star of the first magnitude, and we have fading glimpses of others who received honors due only to genius, or to talent of the first order. They were not judged apart as women, for they have come down to us as peers of great men. The divine gift of genius was rare then, as now and always, but even in women it did not lack recognition. To prove the gift and exact the homage, perhaps in any age, we have simply to show the fruit, except in a decadence, when the finest fruit loses its savor for corrupted tastes. If the number who wrote for immortality was small, it must be remembered that probably there were not enough people in all Greece to make a good-sized modern city.

The statues that were reared to these women have long since vanished from the classic hills they graced, and their voices are heard only in the faintest of musical echoes. Most of them have fallen into eternal silence. That there were many others devoted to things of the intellect, but unknown to fame, it is fair to presume, as we see only those who look back upon us from the shining peaks of that far past, while the dark waters of oblivion have settled over the possible treasures of its sunny slopes and fragrant valleys. How many of our own women, with their myriads of books, lectures, and clubs, their university courses, their versatile intellects, and their unlimited freedom, are likely to be quoted two or three thousand years hence, and set in the firmament to live forever?

To be sure, we stand upon a higher moral and social level, we have more knowledge, our field of action is broader, our ideals of virtue are higher, and we have privileges and pleasures of which they never dreamed. It is quite impossible to put ourselves on the simple plane of these women. The world has grown old and sophisticated; we have learned to classify ourselves, to choose our fields of knowledge, to consecrate our talents to what we call larger uses. Perhaps we never again can reach the lyrical heights of these children of passion, imagination, and song. Our triumphs are of another sort. But whatever intellectual distinctions we may attain, it is to this youth of the world that we must look for the apotheosis of love and beauty.

It is needless to ask why we can point to no second Sappho. There is but one Parthenon. Broken and crumbling, it stands in its white majesty forever alone. The Hellenic spirit is as dead as the gods of Olympus.

GLIMPSES OF THE SPARTAN WOMAN

· Homeric and Spartan Types Compared ·
· Training of the Spartan Woman ·
· Her Education Superior to that of Men ·
· Her Executive Talent ·
· Her Heroism ·
· Agesistrata Cratesiclea Chelonis ·
· The Puritans of the Classic World ·

The strength and vigor of the Homeric types reappear in the Spartan woman, but without their sweetness and charm. Was this charm the subtle touch of the poet’s imagination, or was it due in part to the setting that brought into relief their most lovable qualities? Their central point of character was a domestic one, and round this clustered all the gentler virtues. The central trait of the Spartan woman was patriotism, and to this even the tenderest affections were subordinate. The colder light of history shows them in outlines that are hard and stern. The fine symmetry of an ideal womanhood was lost in the excess of a single virtue that overshadowed all the others. Some one tells a mother who is waiting for tidings of a battle that her five sons have perished. “You contemptible slave,” she replies, “that is not what I wish to know. How fares my country?” On learning that it was victorious, she says, “Willingly then do I hear of the death of my sons.” “A glorious fate!” exclaims another, to a friend who offered her sympathy for the loss of her boy in war. “Did I not bear him that he might die for Sparta?” Here lay the first and last duty of these women. Natural affection, private interest, inclination, everything we deem sacred, even to life, was at the bidding of the State, which strangled itself and its citizens with petty tyrannies in the name of liberty. They were dedicated to the State, ordered to rear men for the State, sacrificed to the State. This destiny they accepted without a murmur, finding in it their glory and their pride.

Even as children the Spartan women caught the spirit of civic devotion, which was to be the dominant one in their lives. An anecdote in point is told of the little Gorgo, who was afterward the wife of the brave Leonidas. When a child of eight years, she happened to be in the room one day while a messenger was trying to bribe her father to aid the Persians. He offered ten talents at first, and gradually raised the sum until the child, suspecting danger, said: “Go away, father; this stranger will corrupt you.” It is pleasant to record that her advice was laughingly taken. When she was grown to womanhood, she rendered great service to her country, and proved her own sagacity, by finding a message of vital concern so concealed in a wax tablet that no one had suspected it. “You Lacedæmonians are the only women in the world to rule men,” said a foreigner to her. “We are the only women who bring forth men,” was the ready reply. When her distinguished husband went away to his last battle, with forebodings of his fate, he could find no better parting words than these: “Marry nobly and bear brave sons.” We might regard the consolation as questionable, but it shows the inexorable tyranny of a single idea.

It was from Sparta that the beautiful Helen sailed away on that fateful day which changed the face of the primitive world, and the tradition of her loveliness was not lost. The Spartan women were still noted for beauty of a healthy, vigorous, luxuriant sort, but it seems to have lacked the distinctly feminine and magical quality that raised Helen to the ranks of the goddesses. They were of firmer mold and less sensuous type. Aphrodite fared badly among the sturdy people in the valley of the Eurotas. She had but one temple, and even there she sat armed with a sword and veiled, with ignominious fetters on her feet. Artemis, active, fleet of foot, and strong, held the place of honor. Delicacy and tenderness were marks of inferiority which Spartan training tended to efface. These brave, decided, clear-headed, and efficient women had abundant heroism, but little of the warm, sympathetic temperament which we call womanly and they called weak. This goes far to prove that, within certain limits, the accepted standard of what is womanly, and what is not, depends largely upon custom, or fashion, or expediency, and suggests some unpleasant possibilities if the race of women should be fully educated to the hard uses and material ideals of a purely industrial or commercial life, as outlined in the brains of many modern social reformers. Such uses may be a present necessity rather than a choice, but whether the gain in strength and independence will compensate for the inevitable loss of many gentler qualities is one of the problems for the future to solve. In any case, the old theory of a divine law that has fixed the nature as well as the status of women in the economy of creation, is likely to be seriously disturbed, as it was in the Sparta of old. In the martial chorus that called itself the song of liberty, the musical, love-inspired voices of women were lost. It celebrated the apotheosis of force, which has always been fatal to the finer and more spiritual gifts of the less militant sex. But for once it served them indirectly a good turn, in spite of certain hardening effects upon the character and manners. This is quite evident when we compare the Doric woman with the secluded Athenian of softer ways but with no outlet for her intelligence, and apparently no influence.

Fortunately the supreme aim of the founders of Sparta was one which they were wise enough to know could not be attained without a larger freedom and development for women. It was a one-sided training that was given them, and the freedom was not altogether satisfactory from our point of view, if indeed we should call it freedom at all. But as an important factor in the State they were duly honored. It was an accepted theory that brave and vigorous men must spring from brave and vigorous women, so the aim of all their discipline was to make strong and healthy mothers. No delicate girl was allowed to marry, for the same reason that no sickly child was allowed to live. To insure the vitality of the race and the consequent glory of the State, girls were trained with boys in athletic exercises. They ran, wrestled, and boxed with them in public,—sometimes with no veil but their modesty,—danced with them at festivals, and marched freely with them in religious processions. All this naturally gave them masculine manners, and inevitably led to a spirit of independence and a virile character. The more refined Athenians criticized them and looked upon them much as the conventional Parisian of to-day, who will not send a daughter across the street without a chaperon, looks upon the irrepressible American girl of the frontier. Contrary also to the usual fashion, it was the maidens who had the privilege of living in the public view. They did not even veil their faces, as the married women did.

With all their mannish tendencies, the Spartan women are said to have been noted for purity of character. It is safe perhaps to take with a degree of reservation the assertion that immorality according to their standards was practically unknown. We might at least justly find fault with the standards, and object to the material view taken of relations which we are in the habit of investing with a delicate halo of romance. It was an affair of the State, however, rather than of the individual, and it is a nice point to decide as to the morality of women who accepted from necessity certain prescribed modes of living in which they had no choice. So peculiar were the general notions of decorum that it was considered disgraceful for a bridegroom to be seen in the company of his wife; yet he could exchange her at will or at the command of the rulers, and jealousy was laughed at as a “vain and womanish passion.” But it was the pride of the Spartans that no invasion of the sanctity of the home was ever heard of! They excused themselves for what we should call moral delinquencies of the worst sort—if indeed they thought any excuse needed, which is not probable—by the convenient maxim that the end justifies the means. The interests of the State were above any moral law whatever. No doubt the arbitrary manner in which women were often disposed of for the public good, or at the caprice of their lords, seemed to them a better sort of fate than living in seclusion, as their Attic sisters did, under the roof of a man who gave them no liberty, and no society, not even his own. They certainly were not troubled with an excess of sentiment; but marriages were, on the whole, happy, and love was often a factor in them, which was rarely the case among their more civilized neighbors. It was not in the nature of these practical people to look at things from an esthetic point of view. Their notions were confessedly utilitarian. To-day we should call many of them scientific. Happily, modern science has not yet meddled quite so far with the rights of the individual, though clearly headed in that direction.

If the Spartan woman did not relish such cavalier treatment, she had the small comfort of knowing that men were not free themselves, and that really, on the whole, she had the best of it. “The door of his court is the boundary of every man’s freedom,” was a Lacedæmonian maxim. Outside of it, all of his movements were controlled by the State. In this paradise of socialism, he was punished for not marrying, for waiting too long, and for marrying the wrong woman, that is, one who was too old, or too young, or too rich, or too far above or below him in station. Archidamus, one of their rulers, was fined for marrying a little woman, because she would “bring them a race of pygmies instead of kings.” There were special penalties for those who sought money instead of merit and suitability. The fortune-hunter fared badly in Sparta. We have grown civilized and changed all that. A man suffered his penalty for remaining single, even if he were a coward whom no one was permitted to marry, which seems doubly hard. The poor bachelors who would not or could not take a wife, were stripped and marched in a procession about the market-place on a cold day once a year, as a fit target for ridicule and contempt, not to say more tangible missiles. If any woman had a private grudge, she might vent it with impunity, even to blows, while the unfortunate victim was forced to chant his own miserere. Maiden ladies of mature age were rare among the hills of Lacedæmon.

Notwithstanding the low ideals which would seem to have reduced the women of Sparta to the position of useful animals, valued solely for their physical vigor and fitness to be mothers of a hardy race, they evidently constituted a leisure class which had a monopoly of whatever learning and refinement were to be found there. They lived in such comfort as they could command, while their husbands slept on cold beds of reeds, dined on black bread and coarse rations at the public table, and practised every form of asceticism to fit themselves for war. Their sons were taken from them at seven, to be put under the training of men and subjected to the same stern discipline. The spinning, weaving, and other work of the family was given to slaves, so that the privileges of luxury and idleness fell to the women alone. They came and went as they chose, and were even thought to have intellects worth cultivating. Men looked upon literary and artistic pursuits as effeminate. A Spartan king replied to some one who brought to his notice the greatest musician of his time, by pointing to his cook as the best maker of black broth. This social Utopia in which the individual was lost in the mass, and no one could safely be superior to his neighbor, was the blessed haven of mediocrity and what we should call indolence. War was the only honorable business; even trade and the mechanic arts were left to slaves. A Spartan visiting Athens was much disturbed on hearing that a man had been fined for idleness, and naïvely asked to see one who was punished for keeping up his dignity. Life was materialized, and all fine ideals were destroyed save the single one of national glory, for which they willingly stifled personal feeling and personal talent. Things of the intellect and spirit were quite ignored.

But the Doric women had to some extent the tastes of the Æolians, and were as a rule far better educated than their husbands. We hear of clubs or associations of women for the cultivation of the mind, and for teaching girls after the fashion of the time. In music they excelled. Aristophanes introduces in “Lysistrata” choruses of Spartan and Athenian maidens who sing in friendly rivalry. Many of the parthenia, or processional hymns, were written by foreign poets for these young girls, whose spiritual aspirations found vent in that way. They did not give voice to personal emotions, but to great religious or patriotic enthusiasms.

Whatever education may have been given to women, it is not likely that their intellectual standards were very broad or very high; at least, we have no visible evidence of it, as we find no living trace of their talents for some centuries after the brief poetic flowering that followed Sappho, and even then not in Sparta. It was among the Dorians of a later time, and mainly in the colonies, that the feminine taste for literature revived, but it took a didactic or philosophical form, and they wrote in prose.

The talent of the Spartan women was largely executive, and they were noted for judgment, as well as for heroism. As nurses they were in great demand in other parts of Greece. A strong proof of their gifts of administration is found in the fact that they had equal rights of inheritance with men, and came in time to own two fifths of the land and a large share of the personal property. This gave them a dignity and influence not accorded to their sex elsewhere. Aristotle did not like their freedom and power. He claimed that they ruled their husbands too imperiously; also, that they were liable to be troublesome in times of war, as it was impossible to bring them under military discipline. If they ruled the rulers, he thought that the results would be the same as if they ruled in their own right. Plutarch tells us that “the Spartans listened to their wives, and women were permitted to meddle more with public business than men with the domestic.” Again he says that “women considered themselves absolute mistresses in their houses; indeed, they wanted a share in affairs of State, and delivered their opinions with great freedom concerning the most weighty matters.” But freedom is relative, and a little of it goes a great way where there has been, as a rule, none at all. It does not seem that any fears on this subject were realized, as their influence, so far as we know, was conservative, and they were subordinate in theory if not always in fact. “When I was a girl I was taught to obey my father, and I obeyed him,” said a woman, when asked to do something of doubtful propriety; “and when I became a wife I obeyed my husband; if you have anything just to urge, make it known to him first.” A clever if not very chivalrous writer of the time says: “It becomes a man to talk much, and a woman to rejoice in all she hears”—a comfortable arrangement for dull husbands, who would be sure at least of an appreciative audience at home.

But we find instances of heroic devotion among these hardy women, for which we look in vain among the ignorant and secluded wives of Athens. It is a pity that Plutarch did not give some of them a distinct place in his gallery of celebrities. He had a superior wife himself, a well-bred woman of dignity, tenderness, great mental vigor, simple taste, and distinguished virtues, who was above the vanities of her time, and bore sorrow like a philosopher. He loved her devotedly, praised her fortitude, and admired her strength. This perhaps accounts for the fact that he was kindly disposed toward women in general, and thought that their fame should be known, since love of glory was not confined to one sex. But if he did not set them on a pinnacle of their own, he has shown us by various anecdotes that they could counsel like seers and die like heroes. In the decline of Sparta, when Agis planned to restore the old simplicity it had lost with the coming of luxury and foreign ways, he asked the aid of his mother, the brave Agesistrata, a woman of great wealth and influence. She thought the division of property he proposed neither wise nor practicable, and advised him against it. But when she found his heart set upon it as a means of winning glory, as well as bringing back the people to virtue and simpler manners, she consented not only to give up her own great fortune, but to induce others to join her. As the wealth of Sparta was largely in the hands of women who were less disinterested and did not care to lose either their luxuries or their power, this socialistic movement failed, and its self-sacrificing leaders were put to death. When Agesistrata was led into the prison to see her son, he lay strangled before her. She tenderly placed her own dead mother by his side, and baring her neck with calm dignity, said: “May this prove for the good of Sparta.”

In the second attempt to restore the prestige of the falling State, Cratesiclea rivals the great heroines of the dramatists in her noble self-surrender. Ptolemy demanded, as the price of his alliance, that Cleomenes should send his mother and son to Egypt as hostages. When she heard of it she smilingly said: “Was this the thing you have so long hesitated to tell me? Send this body of mine at once where it will be of the most use to Sparta, before age renders it good for nothing.” She went without tears, saying that no one must see them weep. Finding afterward that the king was hampered by the fear that some ill might befall them, she sent him word to do what was best, and never mind what became of an old woman and a little child. This enterprise, too, was a futile one, but the women who had inspired men with their own courage and devotion died as bravely as they had lived. It is a touching scene where the young and beautiful wife of Panteus pays the last offices to her dead friends, then, folding her robe modestly about her, tranquilly tells the executioner to do his work.

“In women too there lives the strength of battle,” says Sophocles, and nowhere could he have found such heroic examples as among the rugged hills of Sparta. Out of such material, Antigones and Iphigenias are created.

Beneath a discipline of the affections so severe that it seems as if they must have been crushed altogether, we sometimes fall upon unsuspected depths of tenderness. Chelonis left her husband in his day of power, to care for her father, who had been deposed and was in disgrace and need. When the political tables were turned, and her father was again on the throne, she pleaded with eloquence and tears for her husband’s life. Her wise and tactful words saved him, but he was exiled. She was urged by her family to stay and enjoy the fruits of their victory, but, turning sorrowfully away, she took her children, kissed the altar where they had found a sanctuary, and went out with her disgraced husband to poverty and obscurity.

We cannot measure these Spartan women by the standards of to-day. They did not belong to the age of university courses, society functions, and Christian ideals. Love as we understand it played a small part in their lives, and of romance there is little trace, though examples of conjugal affection are not rare. Of what we call learning they probably had very little, and of esthetic taste still less, but of clear judgment, solid character, and fearless courage, they had a great deal. They were trained as companions and helpers of men, not as their toys, though they were always subject to them. It was a simple life they led—a life with few graces and few of our complexities. They were the Puritans of the classic world, without the Puritan conscience or moral sense, but with more than Puritan courage and fortitude.

THE ATHENIAN WOMAN, ASPASIA, AND THE FIRST SALON

· Vassalage of the Athenian Woman ·
· Her Ignorance and Seclusion ·
· Religious Festivals · The Hetæræ ·
· Aspasia · Her Position · Her Gifts ·
· Tribute of Socrates ·
· Devotion of Pericles ·
· The First Salon · Opinions of the Philosophers ·
· Woman’s Inferior Position a Cause of Athenian Decline ·

I

The Athenians agreed with the opinion ascribed to Pericles that “the best wife is the one of whom the least is said either of good or evil.” But this wise statesman does not seem to have found his theory agreeable in practice, as he sent away his own wife, who was quite innocent even of local fame, to put in her place the cleverest and most talked of woman of her time. She accepted the inevitable with becoming philosophy, if not gratefully, and it must be said to his credit that he was kind enough to help her to another husband. But what became of his theory? One is tempted to think that Thucydides, who put these words into his mouth, was speaking largely for himself, as it is clear that he thought women too unimportant, if not too precious, to be talked about; else why did the great historian so utterly ignore them?

It is a significant fact which upsets many pleasant little theories about the superior justice of a democracy, that women who shared the power and glory of their husbands in the heroic age,—even if they had little of their own,—and preserved a measure of influence under the rule of kings in historic times, lost their honored position in republican Athens. In a rule of the people they had no longer the prestige of an aristocracy, and they did not count politically. As they held no recognized place of honor, and it was not respectable to shine by their talents, they had no apparent claim to consideration. They might stand on a pedestal to add to the glory of men, they might grace a hereditary throne for the honor of a family, but it never occurred to the classic world that woman sprang, as the witty Frenchman said, “from the side of Adam, and not from his feet.”

To all intents and purposes, the Attic women were slaves, with no rights and few privileges. We do not know much about them directly, as they left no record of themselves, and very little was written of them except by the satirists, who are always ready to distort the truth in order to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” Historians were strangely silent regarding them; unless of royal lineage, women were too insignificant. It is difficult, in the face of the few facts we know, to credit the brilliant Athenians with any chivalry. We must either suppose that the poets were a sour and disappointed race, or that they reflected the spirit of their time. Apart from the few great ideals that lived in the imaginations of men, everything that has come down to us shows the light estimate in which women were held. They were a lower order of beings, and anything done by their advice was invalid. “Women are an evil,” says the comedian, “and yet, my countrymen, one cannot set up a house without evil; for to be married or not to be married is alike bad.” This arrogant and contemptuous tone runs through the Attic literature, as I have shown more fully elsewhere.

From the vague and shadowy outlines of a life that was practically shut out from the light of day twenty-five centuries ago, we cannot gather with certainty even the moral and domestic value of women who were treated with lofty disdain by poets, satirists, and historians alike. But we do know that intellectually they counted for nothing, within the pale of orthodox society. At a period when the central idea was culture, when art was at its zenith, and there were giants in literature, the wives and daughters of men noted before all things for brilliancy and esprit had fallen into hopeless ignorance and vassalage. They lacked even the companionship and the small diversions of the Oriental harem, where the inmates, though they had only a small fraction of a husband, could break the monotony by gossiping or quarreling with the other wives. The women of the better class at Athens had special apartments, usually in the upper story, so that they could not go out without being seen. Men went to market themselves or sent their slaves. We learn from Aristophanes that they often put their wives under lock and key, with a seal when they went away, also that they kept Molossian hounds to frighten away possible lovers. A woman addressed her husband as “master,” was always a minor, and could transact no business on her own account, which even Plato thought unjust. If he died she was not his heir, but the ward of her son or of some male relative. In her marriage she was not consulted, and she was never supposed to know any man but the one chosen for her. Solon, who wished to prevent mercenary marriages, decreed that no dowries should be given, and that the bride could have only three suits of clothes; later, unions were arranged by the families, on a basis of equal fortunes. Infidelity on the part of the husband was no ground of complaint. As wives were so closely guarded there does not seem to have been much danger of indiscretions, but they were sent away on the slightest suspicion, and their punishments were carried to the utmost refinement of cruelty. In spite of this surveillance, possibly because of it, sins against morality were more frequent than in Sparta.

After the age of sixty, women were permitted to go to funerals outside of their families, if they would not mourn too violently. These occasions must have been rather welcome than otherwise, as Greek funerals were not hopelessly solemn affairs, except to the immediate family. Brides had the special privilege of sitting at table at their own wedding banquets, to which only relatives or very near friends were asked. The amusements of women seem to have consisted largely in looking out of the window and making their toilets. If they went to the theater at all, they were limited to tragedy and had to take back seats.

We have an account of one model husband who is not content that his young wife should simply know how to spin, weave, and direct her maids, so he tries to educate her. She is only fifteen, and he says that she has lived under the strictest restraint so that she might “see as little, hear as little, and ask as few questions as possible.” When he has her properly domesticated so that she dares to speak in his presence, he explains their mutual responsibilities in terms that must have mystified this child of nature a little, tells her to do well what the gods have suited to her and men approve, to use no cosmetics or aids to beauty, and to knead bread or fold linen for exercise, since she must not walk out. The main thing he dwells upon is the necessity of looking closely after their common fortunes; but she has also to take care of the children, and nurse the slaves when they are ill. He kindly admits that if she is superior to him she will be mistress,—taking good care, however, that such an unfortunate state of affairs shall not exist so far as education is concerned,—and assures her that the better she serves the interests of his family and household, the more she will be honored. This is all very well so far as it goes, and we may readily admit that it is of more vital importance to administer the affairs of one’s family with judgment and dignity than to talk about art or read Homer. But the docile wife had a housekeeper as well as plenty of slaves, and, naturally, abundant leisure. It certainly implied a degree of what Socrates called “manly understanding” on her part, to follow her husband’s abstruse reasoning on the duties of women, and his minute instructions for carrying them out; yet this wise representative of the most civilized race the world has known never so much as hints that she has an intellect.

Socrates listens with great interest to this advanced theory of wife-training as it is unfolded to him, and sagely remarks that the husband is responsible for her errors if he does not properly teach her. It seems that he did not try the system on Xanthippe, or if he did it was a dismal failure, as the much-abused woman is never quoted as a model or a saint, and we do not hear that he taxed himself with her shortcomings. He said that he married her for the excitement of conquest—the same motive that leads a man to try his power over a high-spirited horse; also as a discipline, because he was sure that he could endure every one else if he could endure her. It would be curious to know what she thought about it, but one cannot help suspecting that she had the lion’s share of the discipline, and that Socrates was a greater success as a philosopher and talker than as a husband.

There was one exception, however, to this rigid seclusion, a small recognition of the fact that women probably have souls. They were allowed a part in religious festivals, and these were events in their lives. They meant a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the outer world. Perhaps they meant also a little spiritual consolation, which must often have been greatly needed; but of this we are not sure. The Hellenic divinities were not eminently consoling, and the wise Athena was particularly unsympathetic, though the Athenian virgins had at least the pleasure of making her richly ornamented robes, and putting them on her once a year. The woman in the comedy says that at seven she could carry the peplum in the procession, at ten she ground cakes for the patron goddess, and when she grew to be a beautiful maiden, she had charge of the sacred basket.

One can imagine the flutter of pleasure with which the young girls of the golden age of Athens donned their white draperies and gold-embroidered mantles to march in the Panathenaic procession to the Acropolis. Their snowy veils floated airily in the breeze, as they went up the marble steps of the propylæa chanting choral hymns and carrying in their hands the branches of silvery olive to lay at the feet of the stately goddess. How bright the sky! how blue the sparkling sea! How beautiful the white temples and colonnades, alive with sculptured heroes! Before them rose Hymettus in its robe of violet haze, and the cone of Lycabettus, sharply outlined in the clear air. Sheltered behind the low hills on the other side of the vast olive-groves, the magnificent temple of Eleusis, with its heart of mystery, towered in its peerless majesty, and the restless waves of Salamis lapped the shore at its side. This world of beauty was young then and fresh, with no age-old tragedies to sadden the brilliant crowd that wound in dazzling array through the forest of columns and statues. The flower of Athens was there—brave, handsome, and clever men, poets, artists, and philosophers, warriors on prancing horses, beautiful women and laughing children. If the uncaged maidens were tempted to flirt a little with their soft, dark eyes, who can blame them? They were young and human, companionship was sweet, and they too had tender hearts, though small account was made of them.

But the day ends. The sacred Athena is resplendent in her new robe. The gay crowd moves back past the exquisite little Ionic temple of Victory and down the massive steps into the agora, where life goes on as before. Men throng the porticos and talk of the new play of Sophocles, or the last statue of Phidias, or the prospects of war, or any of the thousand and one things that come uppermost in the affairs of a great city. When the shadows fall and the stars come out bright and shining in that crystal air, they gather at banquets or symposia, where flute-players and dancing-girls are brought in to amuse them, or some Lais or Phryne of the hour enthralls them by her beauty and dazzles them with her wit. But the wives and daughters of these men, who do not see fit to educate them for companions, go back to their lonely homes and to an isolation from all social and intellectual interests as deep as if they were asleep in the sculptured tombs of the Via Sacra.

The women of Athens fulfilled their duties with becoming modesty, so far as we know. They were respectably ignorant, and did not encroach upon the time-honored privileges of men. It is true that Elpinice, the sister of Cimon, was a trifle strong-minded, and, taking the Spartan women as models, went about alone; but we do not hear that she had any following. Unpleasant things were said about her, which we are safe in doubting, as unpleasant things have always been said of women who presumed to have opinions of their own, or to walk outside of the straight line of tradition. At all events, a rich Athenian fell in love with her, and was glad to take her without a dowry and pay the fine of her distinguished father. But it is certain that no appreciable number of Attic ladies were disposed to incur the odium of public opinion so distinctly expressed in these words:

Good women must abide within the house;
Those whom we meet abroad are nothing worth.

Why in the face of such reverent submission were they so contemptuously spoken of? We are often told to-day that women cannot expect any privileges when they want rights. It may be pertinent to ask, in the name of consistency, why they had no privileges when they sat humbly at the feet of their husbands and demanded no rights?

But it was among these women that the great dramatists lived and created the masterpieces of the world. It may be that they saw and felt the cheerless side of so fettered a life, and that is why they painted their heroines in such somber colors, too often innocent victims of men’s misdeeds, and doomed to suffering with the sad inevitability of fate. But the noble character and fine intelligence given to so many of them must have had some counterpart in reality. Did the city that produced Antigone, Iphigenia, and Alcestis, have no great women, or did their creators look elsewhere for the moral dignity that made them possible? And where were the models found? Not, surely, among the hetæræ whose power, whatever it may have been, was not a moral one. Not even among the goddesses, who were notoriously vain, selfish, crafty, and cruel. We know that a thousand untold tales of virtue and heroism are hidden behind closed doors, and we may well believe they were not without precedent among these apparently colorless and pent-up lives.

Then it is easy perhaps to err in assuming that there were no women who rose above hard conditions into a degree of companionship with their husbands. It is true they had no education and were excluded from the society of men who had it, but it is impossible to suppose that the women of so brilliant a race were utterly without the clear perception and flexible intelligence which made its men so famous. Nor can we infer invariable misery. There have been good men in all ages who loved their families, and women whose light could not be extinguished. The great Cimon is said to have had an ardent affection for his wife, and he was inconsolable after her death, though he did not curb his wandering fancies while she lived. Socrates mentions Niceratus as “one who was in love with his wife and loved by her.” There is a familiar anecdote of Themistocles that puts him in a pleasant light. He said in a laughing way that his little son was greater than any man in Greece, “for the Athenians command the Greeks, I command the Athenians, his mother commands me, and he commands his mother.” If reports be true, however, the influence of his wife was largely theoretical, as it did not suffice to keep him from doing some very disreputable things. But he wished a worthy man for his daughter, rather than a rich one, saying he “would prefer a man without money to money without a man.” Aristotle is not quoted among the champions of women, but he tenderly loved his own wife, whom he married in spite of the reverses which had ruined her family. Her life was brief, but he left orders that when he died her remains should be transferred to the tomb which held his own, according to her last request. This was done long years after her death, though he had another wife whose virtues he commends, asking his friends to give her kind attention and provide her with a suitable husband if she wishes to marry again. These instances among well-known men are worthy of note, and others might be cited. But the exceptions prove the rule, and the very fact that it was a matter of comment when a man was in love with his wife shows that it was rare.

II

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the great Athenians were without the sympathy and influence of educated women; indeed, it may be safely said that no great things in art or literature have ever been done without this inspiration. The ignorance of the Attic woman had its natural protest, though it did not come from an orthodox source. Respectability was on the side of servitude. It had a dull time, but it was decorous, and consoled itself, as it has often done since, with the reflection that dullness was its natural lot. No doubt it took pride in its nothingness, and looked with haughty disdain upon the clever foreign women who were free to do as they chose. Fashion is imperious, not to say cruel, and even the Chinese lady hobbles along on her distorted feet with a happy consciousness of distinction that amply repays her for all her suffering.

But social conventions had small weight with the foreign hetæræ or companions, who had no legal rights, and no caste to lose. The real power of women was in their hands. They were intelligent, often gifted, and the better class had refined and graceful manners, which the Athenian wives evidently had not. It was said of them that they were delicate at table, and not like the native women, who “stuffed their cheeks, and tore off the meat.” They were also noted for wit and esprit, a quality of volatilized intellect that has always had great social charm. These advanced women of the day, who cast into the shade their illiterate sisters, monopolized both attention and honors. Men praised the good women who stayed at home and looked after their families, but sought the society of clever ones who did neither of these fine things. With curious inconsistency, they found the culture which was reprehensible and out of the proper order of nature in their wives and daughters so charming in other women as to merit the highest distinction. Poets sang of them, artists immortalized them, statesmen and philosophers paid court to them.

’T is not for nothing that where’er we go
We find a temple of hetæræ there,
But nowhere one to any wedded wife,

says the poet.

Unfortunately, talent and the virtues did not always go together, and it is impossible, at this distance, to determine with any certainty who were good and who were not. In the conservative circles of Athens, intelligence itself was a vice in women, and put them under a ban. They might pray to Athena, and offer incense to her, and embroider her robes, but it would not do to take this personification of wisdom and knowledge for a model; indeed, it is not quite clear why so dangerous a representative of the sex that was thought to have no intellect worth considering should have been chosen to preside over all the Attic divinities. There was a time, according to Varro, when it had been customary for women to take part with men in public councils. In the early ages they voted to name Athens after Athena, outvoting the men by one. Poseidon was angry, and the sea overflowed. To appease the god, the citizens imposed a punishment on their wives. They were to lose their votes, the children were to receive no more their mother’s name, and they were no longer called Athenians. Perhaps this is why they were relegated forever after to ignorance and obscurity. Athena, however, retained her power, and men still worshiped the gray-eyed goddess in the abstract, as their fathers had done, doubtless quite content that the superfluous wisdom of woman should be given a pedestal so high and remote that it was not likely to cause serious inconvenience in family relations. But their personal devotion was largely reserved for Aphrodite, who was more beautiful and facile, if not so wise, and still less fit to be held up as a worthy example for her sex. The race had not greatly changed since its men went to their death for the “divine Helen,” and thought the world well lost for a sight of her radiant beauty.

The witty Phryne, whose exquisite face and form was made immortal by Apelles and Praxiteles, was given a statue of gold between two kings at Delphi. In the cypress-grove at Corinth there was a monument to the beautiful Lais, who had enriched the city with fine architecture. Lamia built a splendid portico for the people of Sicyon, and a temple at Athens was consecrated to her under the name of Aphrodite. One of the most striking and costly monuments in Greece was also erected there to Pythionice. The wit and fascination of Glycera brought her the honors due to a queen. Some of her letters to Menander were preserved, and they were said to show not only a tender and delicate sentiment, but a fine intellectual sympathy with her poet lover. No doubt the tributes offered to the notoriously dissolute women were largely the expression of a beauty-loving people who cherished “art for art’s sake.”

But there were other women with serious gifts of a high order, who were far less likely to be honored with temples and statues. Leontium, the disciple and favorite of Epicurus, wrote a treatise against Theophrastus that was quoted by Cicero as a model of style. She had a thoughtful face, and was painted in a meditative attitude by Theodorus. It matters little whether Diotima was Arcadian priestess or philosopher; she was the friend of Socrates, the counselor of the wisest and subtlest of men. It was her high and spiritual conception of love that he quoted at the famous symposium of Plato, raising the conversation from a curious blending of unholy passion and metaphysical subtlety to a region of light. Famous among the disciples of Pythagoras was Perictione, who attracted the attention of Aristotle by writing on such grave subjects as “Wisdom” and “The Harmony of Woman.” She was duly conservative, and accepted the passive position of her sex, dwelling on their need of a forbearing spirit. Possibly this amiable attitude accounts in part for the kind consideration of the philosopher. More advanced and less popular was Hipparchia, the wife of Crates, an eminent Cynic, who called the statue of Phryne “a votive offering of the profligacy of Greece.” She recognized virtue as the supreme end of life, but contended that “virtue is the same in a man as in a woman.” To Theodorus she said: “What Theodorus is not wrong in doing, the same thing Hipparchia ought not to be wrong in doing.” That she was severely attacked goes without saying. Such sentiments were subversive of the inalienable rights of man, in the code of the classic world. It was easier and more agreeable to discredit the woman than to raise their own standards. Themista, the wife of Leon, was a philosopher, corresponded with Epicurus, and was called by Cicero “a sort of female Solon.” Lastheneia was a pupil of Plato, and went so far as to disguise herself in a man’s robes in order to hear him discourse at the Academy.

Perhaps it is unfair to group these women together. They were of different shades, and not all contemporary. Some of them were Athenians. Of most of them we have no knowledge except such as may be gathered from a few passing words in connection with famous men, and even this is involved in doubt and contradiction. What were the attractions of Archaianassa, to whom Plato wrote sonnets, or did she ever exist outside of the realm of dreams?

For dear to me Theoris is,

says Sophocles. Did he find in her the talent that inspired his own? And what was the secret of Archippa’s influence, that he should have left her his fortune? Or is she, too, a myth? Nor can we divine the gifts that drew the eloquent Isocrates to Metaneira.

How far the honor accorded to so many of the hetæræ was due to their talents and how far to their personal fascination, it is difficult to say. In many cases, beauty was their chief distinction. Some are known to have been fair and frail; others were apparently of good character as well as brilliant intellect. A poet of the time speaks of one as

Pure and on virtue’s strictest model formed.

It would not be quite safe, however, to measure them by our standards. We may go to the Greeks for art and literature, but not for morals. Things that we consider criminal, they looked upon as quite natural and innocent. No doubt, too, many things which we consider so harmless as to pass unnoted would have been censured by them as violations of all laws of decorum.

III

There was one woman, however, whose individuality was too strong to be altogether merged into that of the man with whom her name is associated. Aspasia stands supreme, after Sappho, as the most brilliant and lettered woman of classic times. The center of a circle so luminous that the ages have not greatly dimmed its radiance, she is likely to live as long as the world cherishes the memory of its greatest men. She was the prototype of the charming and intellectual women who made the literary courts of the Renaissance so famous two thousand years afterward; also of the more familiar ones who shone as leaders of the powerful salons of France a century or two later. Even to-day the aspiring woman who dreams of reviving the social triumphs of her sex recalls the golden days of Athens and wonders what magic drew so many of the great poets, statesmen, and philosophers of the world from the groves of the Academy, the colonnades of the Lyceum, the porticos, and the gymnasia, to pour their treasures of wit and thought at the feet of the fair Ionian. She may remember, too, that this fascinating woman was not only the high priestess who presided at the birth of society as we know it, but was also the first to assert the right of the wife to be educated, that she might live as the peer and companion of her husband, not as his slave.

Little is known of the facts of her life. She was the first woman who came from Miletus, the pleasure-loving city of roses, and song, and beautiful maidens. Why or how she left her home we are not told, but there is a vague tradition that her parents were dead and that she went away with the famous Thargelia, whose vigorous intellect, together with her wit and beauty, made her a political power in Thessaly and the wife of one of its kings during the Persian wars, though her personality is the faintest of shadows to-day. It is supposed that Aspasia was young, scarcely more than twenty, when she came to Athens, possibly to live with a relative; but this is only a surmise. As a foreigner, whatever her rank, she was outside the pale of good society. The high-born Athenian women looked askance at her, were jealous of her, and said wicked things about her. To be sure, the all-powerful Pericles took her to his home and called her his wife, but she was not a citizen like themselves, and could not lawfully bear his name.

The relation, however, left-handed though it may have been, was a recognized and permanent one, not less regular perhaps than the morganatic marriages of royal princes to-day, which make a woman a pure and legal wife but never a queen. So rare was the devotion of the grave statesman that it was thought worthy of record, and it was a matter of gossip that he kissed Aspasia when he went out and when he came in—clearly a startling innovation among Athenian husbands. Still more astonishing was the fact that he listened to her counsel and talked with her on State affairs, which, according to their traditions, no reputable woman ought to know anything about. Plutarch tells us that some went so far as to say that he paid court to her on account of her wisdom and political sagacity. Socrates confesses his own indebtedness to her in the use of language, and says that she made many great orators. He thinks it no wonder that Pericles can speak, as he has so excellent a mistress in the art of rhetoric, one who could even write his speeches. He was himself so pleased with a funeral oration she had spoken in his presence, partly from previous thought and partly from the inspiration of the moment, that he learned it by heart. A friend to whom he repeated it was amazed that a woman could compose such a speech, and Socrates added that he might recall many more if he would not tell. This special address was such a masterpiece of wisdom and eloquence that Pericles was asked to give it every year. As he was quite able to write his own, there was no room for jealousy, even if Aspasia sometimes found in the same field a happy outlet for her fine talent and living enthusiasm.

All this points to a strong probability that the gifted Milesian came to Athens to teach rhetoric and other arts of which she was mistress, as a Frenchwoman might seek her fortune in our own country to-day. But she had not the same immunity from criticism, as the very fact of her talents, and her ability to utilize them, sufficed to put her under a cloud. This, too, might account for the wicked things Aristophanes said of her, but we cannot imagine that Socrates would have advised his friends to send their sons to her for training had they been true. He knew her well, had profited by her instructions, and no one will charge him with gallantry or the disposition to give undue praise. He was essentially a truth-seeker. It is a matter of note, too, that the philosophers had only pleasant words for Aspasia. Her detractors were the satirists and comic poets; but who ever went to either for justice or truth? She was clear-sighted, penetrating, and versed not only in letters but in civil affairs, so it was easy enough to say that she was the power behind the throne in the Samian and Peloponnesian wars. It is certain, however, that Pericles was too wise a statesman to be led into a war by any one against his judgment. It is quite likely that she had young girls in her house who came to be instructed in the refinements and amenities of life, as poetic maidens had flocked to Sappho from all the isles of the sea a century or so before. This again was a fruitful source of calumny and satire. But it is impossible to read the Attic comedians without a conviction that they measured every one by their own moral standards, which were of the lowest and coarsest. A woman who could discuss philosophy with Socrates and Anaxagoras, art with Phidias, poetry with Sophocles and Euripides, politics and history with Thucydides, if occasion offered, and affairs of the gay world with the young Alcibiades, was not likely to escape the tongue of scandal among people who numbered the silent subjection of women among their most sacred traditions.

Of the beauty of Aspasia we are not sure. We hear of her “honey-colored” or golden hair, of her “small, high-arched foot,” of her “silvery voice”; but no one of her time has told us that she was beautiful. There is a bust on which her name is inscribed, but it gives us no clue to the living charm that held great men captive. Did this charm lie in the depth and brilliancy of the veiled eyes, in the tender curve of the half-voluptuous mouth, or in the subtle and variable light of the soul that forever eludes the chilling marble? Another bust, supposed to represent her, has a gentler quality, a finer distinction, with a faint shadow on the thoughtful face. But the secret of her power did not lie in any rare perfection of form or feature. Perhaps this secret is always difficult to define. Of her fascinating personality we are left in no doubt. With the qualities of esprit that belonged to her race, and all the winning graces of her Ionian culture, she combined an intellect of firm and substantial fiber. She was noted for the divining spirit which instinctively recognized the special gifts of her friends; she had, too, the tact and finesse to make the most of them. This is par excellence the talent of the social leader.

The salon of Aspasia was the first of which we have any record. The stars of the Attic world gathered there, men who were in the advance-guard of Hellenic thought. Reclining on the many-colored cushions beneath the white pillars, with pictured walls and rare tapestries and exquisite statues of Greek divinities about them, they talked of the new temples; of the last word in art; of the triumph of Sophocles, who had just won the prize of tragedy in the theater of Dionysus; perhaps of Æschylus, who had gone away broken-hearted; of happiness, morals, love, and immortality. The thoughtful woman who sat there radiant in her saffron draperies was not silent. Men marveled at her eager intellect, her grasp of Athenian possibilities; they were charmed with her graceful ways and musical speech. We hear of symposia in other houses, where a Theodota dances, the free wit of Lais flashes, and conversation glides on a low and vulgar level, but no wife or daughter ever appears. There is nothing to indicate that the coterie of Aspasia was otherwise than decorous. Music there was, as the accomplished Ionian played the cithara with skill and taste. Wit there must have been, as no company of Athenians was ever without it. But more was said of its serious side. One of the sons of Pericles, angry because his father would not give him all the money he wished, ridiculed this circle of philosophers and the hours they spent in discussing theories or splitting metaphysical hairs. Their learned disquisitions were not at all to the taste of the pleasure-loving youth.

A few men had the courage to bring their wives, and Aspasia talked to them of their duties and the need of cultivating their minds. Nor did she forget the value of manners and the graces. It is said that she wrote a book on cosmetics; but all her teaching, so far as we know it, went to show that personal charm lay not so much in physical beauty as in the culture of the intellect. The few direct words we have from her lips prove that, with a clear sense of values, she was the true child of an age and race that was singularly devoid of sentiment. If she taught Socrates in some things, she was evidently his pupil in others. This is curiously illustrated in an anecdote related by Æschines.

“Tell me,” says Aspasia, one day, to the wife of Xenophon, “if your neighbor had finer gold than you have, whether you would prefer her gold or your own.”

“I should prefer hers,” was the reply.

“Suppose that she had dresses and ornaments of more value than yours; would you prefer your own or hers?”

“Hers, to be sure.”

“If she had a better husband than you have, which would you choose?”

The lady blushed and was silent.

The hostess then turned to the husband with like questions.

“I ask you, O Xenophon, whether, if your neighbor had a better horse than yours, you would prefer your own or his.”

“Certainly his,” was the prompt answer.

“If he had a better farm than yours, which would you wish to own?”

“Beyond doubt, that which is best.”

“Suppose that he had a better wife than you have, would you prefer his wife?”

The conversation became embarrassing, and Xenophon was discreetly silent.

The conclusion was obvious. This too logical questioner advised those present to order their lives so that there should be no more admirable woman or more excellent man; then each would always prefer the other to any one else—a piece of wise counsel that might be profitably considered, in spite of its veiled sophistry. Evidently she did not regard love as a flame that burns without fuel, though in her notions of human perfectibility she makes small account of the quality of the material.

This parlor-talk is a trifle didactic, and lacks the modern elements of popularity, but it is not in the least the talk of such a woman as the enemies of Aspasia pictured her. It was clearly a party of innovation that she led, but it was not a party of corrupt tastes. It was for her opinions that she suffered. Just what connection moral turpitude has with a question of the infallibility of any special form of belief is not apparent, but a charge of impiety cast a darker shadow upon her reputation. In this case it meant little more than a doubt as to the divinity of their quarrelsome and immoral gods, which we should consider highly creditable. She was too rational for a good orthodox pagan. Or it may have meant simply that her house was a rendezvous for the free-thinking philosophers. Here, too, was a woman who took the unheard-of liberty of presiding over her husband’s house, making it agreeable for his friends and attractive for himself. She had put dangerous notions into the heads of Athenian wives. Who was this impertinent foreigner, that she should presume to tell them how to please their husbands? How, indeed, could they please them better than to keep a decorous silence in their apartments, and let their noble lords bring dancing- and talking-women to their banquets, and do otherwise as they liked? Of course she did not respect the gods, and deserved death.

And so she was taken before the judges. The dignified and austere Pericles wept as he pleaded her cause, and his tears won it. She was released, but Anaxagoras, who was under the same charge of impiety because he gave natural causes to apparently supernatural things, as Galileo did centuries later, thought it safe to go away until the fickle Athenians, the French of the classic world, found something else to occupy them.

Without the poetic genius or the passionate intensity of Sappho, Aspasia seems to have had greater breadth and largeness of mind, with the calm judgment and clear reason that belong to a more sophisticated age. She was evidently solid as well as brilliant. That she was eminently tactful and had a great deal of the Greek subtlety counted for much in her success. She had also the perfect comprehension of genius, which is an inspiration, and nearly allied to genius itself. In the vast plans for the glory of Athens, she could hardly have been ignored by the man who adored her and consulted her on the gravest matters. It is not as the Omphale to this Hercules, the Hera to this Zeus, that she has come down to us, save in the jeer of the satirist, but as the watchful Egeria, who whispered prophetic words of wisdom in the ears of the great Athenian. Who knows how far the world owes to her fine insight and critical taste the superb flowering of art which left an immortal heritage to all the ages?

With the death of Pericles and the dispersion of the distinguished group that surrounded him, Aspasia disappears. There was no place at that time for talents like hers, apart from a great man’s protection. It was rumored that she afterward married a rich but obscure citizen, whom she raised by her abilities to a high position in the State, though he did not live long enough to reap much glory from it. The affair savors of the mythical, and perhaps we are safe in giving it little credence. We should like to believe that the woman who had been blessed with the love of a Pericles could never console herself with a lesser man.

Of versatile gifts and endless shades of temperament, teacher, thinker, artist in words and life, critic, musician, friend of women and inspirer of men, but before all things a harmony uniting the grace and sensibility of her sex with a masculine strength of intellect, this gracious Ionian stands with Sappho on the pinnacle of Hellenic culture, each in her own field the highest feminine representative of an esthetic race. Her mission was not an ethical one, and she cannot be so judged; but against the censure of the enemies and rivals of Pericles, as well as of her own, we have abundant evidence that, in her virtues, as in her talents, she surpassed the standards of her class and time. It was not of a light-minded woman that Pericles said when dying: “Athens intrusted her greatness and Aspasia her happiness to me.”

IV

It is not unlikely that Aspasia had much to do with modifying the low views held regarding her sex, and with promoting the discussions of the philosophers who came after her. Socrates had her example before him when he said that the talent of women was not at all inferior to that of men, though they lacked bodily vigor and strength. Plato accorded them the same talents as men, though less in degree; indeed, he went so far as to advise a common training, as in Sparta, on the ground that gifts are diffused equally between the sexes. Aristotle is less generous to women. He accords them weaker reasoning powers, and insists upon their silent and passive obedience; but he preaches to men justice, appreciation, and the sanctity of marriage. On the whole, from our point of view, he paints a more agreeable society than Plato, in spite of the greater equality taught by the latter. The satirists were not slow to take up the matter, and Aristophanes drew a doleful picture of women donning male attire and going to the agora to reform the State, while their husbands were left to look after things at home. They start out with the idea of making everybody happy. There are to be no rich, no poor, no thefts, no slanders, no miseries. Praxagora pleads her cause with all the force and energy of the modern woman who seeks political rights, but she is less poised and goes further. The State is to be intrusted to women. They are successful managers at home and have shown their superior gifts of administration. In any case, they could not do worse than men have done. They end, however, by voting unlimited communism and outdoing the demagogues. This “woman’s congress” was not an unqualified success; indeed, it was a disgraceful failure, as it was intended to be: but it cast into like ridicule the philosophers and the “strong-minded” women, among whom Aspasia was doubtless included, as she had convictions, though the conversations in her salon probably marked the limit of their public expression. Who the others were we do not know, but it is clear that there was an undercurrent of “divine discontent” among the women of two thousand years ago. History repeats itself, and the “woman question” is not a new one, though we have made immense strides in the rational consideration of it.

It is sufficiently clear that the harmonious development of the Hellenic women was in proportion to their liberty of action, and the most fault was found with them where they had the least freedom. If the spirited women of Sparta had been born in conservative Athens the world might never have known that they were capable of so much strength and heroism. The sparks hidden in their cramped souls would have gone out for lack of air. If the secluded Athenian woman had been born in Sparta, who can say that she might not have been as clever as Gorgo, as brave as Cratesiclea, and as independent as Lampito? It is possible that the genius of Sappho would have been smothered in the social atmosphere of either place. There is ample evidence that the intellects of Greek women expanded fast enough when the conventional pressure was even partly removed. Nor is it true that they retrograded in morals as they advanced in intelligence. Never did the Attic poets point their shafts of satire so sharply as against the follies of the ignorant women who were limited mainly to their apartments, far from the possible corruption of knowledge or the visible temptation to sin. The tone of morality was purer even among the free Spartan women, who had more education but less surveillance.

There is nothing more vitally significant in the lives of Athenian wives than the extent to which they saw themselves set aside and neglected for foreigners of more brilliant accomplishments, because they could not or would not break the bonds of fashionable tradition, which decreed for them silence and seclusion. In primitive conditions where no one is educated, the virtues may suffice for companionship; but at a certain stage of civilization, when men read and think, the woman who does not is sure to be practically excluded from his society, though she may still be his housekeeper or the toy of an idle hour. Athens in the height of her glory presented the strange anomaly of a respectable illiterate class from which the mothers of future citizens must be taken, and an educated class without civil rights who could not marry Athenians. If the latter had any domestic ties at all, they were forced into morganatic relations. This did not of necessity imply laxity of character; indeed, it was not always condemned by Athenian moralists. But no class could long maintain any high standard of virtue under such conditions. They opened the way for endless license. The gay and dissolute women from the East flocked to the Hellenic cities, and in the reckless corruption that followed, wise men trace a potent cause of Athenian decline.

REVOLT OF THE ROMAN WOMEN

· The Woman Question an Old One ·
· Character and Virtues of Early Roman Women ·
· Instances of Heroism ·
· Their Disabilities ·
· Primitive Roman Morals ·
· Servitude of Wives · Husband Poisoning ·
· The Oppian Law · The Revolt ·
· Crabbed Cato · Change in Laws ·
· Second Revolt · Hortensia ·
· The Marriage Question ·
· Intellectual Movement · Cornelia ·

I

Not long ago an able and eloquent man, well known in political life, made the astonishing statement that from the time Eve left paradise to the advent of the modern champion of her sex, “woman was apparently content with her subordination.” It is not proposed here to enter at all into the present phases of a subject that has been sufficiently discussed, or to define the precise point where those who belong to what our noble friend is pleased to call the “inferior and defective half of the race” may with reason protest; but as a matter of fact there has never been so prolonged and serious a commotion on the much-talked-of “woman question” as in the Rome of two thousand years ago; and perhaps no recorded moment in the history of women has been of such far-reaching importance as those struggles for justice and recognition. With possibly one exception, the points at issue were not quite the same as in the middle of the nineteenth century, but they involved many of the same privileges. The contention concerned not only a woman’s right to a voice in the control of her own property, but to some consideration in marriage, and a measure of personal liberty. The laws that grew out of it, in the slow process of years, have served as a basis for the codes that have more or less governed civilized countries ever since, and though these have often deviated far from the liberal standard of the statutes of Justinian, they have never fallen permanently to the old level. A certain marked resemblance in the character and growth of the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon woman gives us a special interest in these controversies and their practical outcome.

That the Roman woman had ample cause for protest could hardly be questioned to-day, even by the most determined advocate of the old order of things. The contrast between the character and ability so conspicuously shown by what she did at various times for her country, and the humiliation of her position, was too great. In the qualities of temperament and imagination which, if given free scope, make poets and artists, the Grecian women surpassed her. But the very traits of sensibility that constituted their fascination rendered them an easy prey to the rule of a master. Their chief legacy to posterity was an esthetic one. The talent of the Roman woman was of another sort. She was of a masterful type, striking in physique, strong in purpose, clear in judgment, with the pride and dignity of a race born to rule the world. It was through her practical wisdom in directing affairs, together with her courage, foresight, and indomitable will, that she gained in the end a degree of independence which perhaps we should hardly call by that name to-day, but which was relative freedom and left a permanent trace on after-ages.

Of the heroism, political sagacity, and moral value of the Roman women we have abundant evidence, but it is difficult to catch the outline of faces seen in half-lights, or of characters revealed only on one side. They did not write of themselves, or of each other, as women of later and, to some extent, even of earlier ages have done. There was no Sappho to sing of their joys and sorrows, or give us a clue to what they thought and felt. Men who wrote freely of affairs reserved small space for them, so we know little of their personal life, except through passing glimpses in a few private letters, and the cynical if not malicious pictures of satirists. The Romans were not a creative or imaginative race, and have left us none of the great ideals of womanhood that grace the pages of the Greek poets. No Helen with her divine beauty and charm, no Antigone with her strength of sacrifice, no Andromache with her tender and winning personality, shows us the manner of woman that lived in the minds and hearts of men. But if the delicacy of shading which reveals fine complexities of character is wanting, we have a few records of brave deeds and individual virtues that are likely to stand as long as the world to show us the quality that made them possible. Alcestis going serenely to her death for her weak and selfish lord is not more heroic than Lucretia, who saved the falling liberties of Rome by plunging the dagger into her heart and calling upon her husband to avenge her outraged honor. Iphigenia is not a more touching figure than the innocent Virginia, sacrificed, not to the gods, but to the brutality of wicked men.

From Tanaquil, whose ambition and prophetic insight led the first Tarquin to leave his simple Etruscan home for a Roman throne, to the wise Livia, who shared the power and glory of Augustus for more than half a century, women came to the front in many a public crisis. Men gave them no real liberty, but they did give them monuments. These are mostly gone now, but the records of them are left. Standing by the Capitol to-day and looking across the crumbling temples, columns, statues, and arches which have preserved for us the memories of Old Rome, one is forcibly reminded of the important part played by women in laying the foundations of the long faded glory that still lends these ruins so melancholy and picturesque a charm. The strength and courage of the Roman woman were immortalized in the equestrian statue of the daring Clœlia, in the Via Sacra, that stretches before us. Not far off was the temple of Juno, where the festivals of the Matronalia were held for centuries, in honor of the women who settled the contest between the Romans and the Sabines. Beyond the walls on the way to the Alban hills was the temple of Fortuna Muliebris, which bore lasting testimony to the wisdom and patriotism of Valeria, its first priestess; also to the gentle but powerful influence of Volumnia and Virgilia, who, led by her counsels, saved the city from a too ambitious son and brother. It was the spirit of the divine Egeria that whispered prophetic words of warning to Numa in the secluded grotto beyond the Aventine. The Sibyls held the secrets of divination, and in the vaults at our feet they deposited the books that foretold the destinies of Rome.

There still stands the little temple where the white-robed Vestals watched over the holy Palladium and took care that the sacred fire should never go out for eleven hundred years. Men on the heights of power bowed to the authority of these consecrated women, who occupied everywhere the place of honor, settled disputes, testified without oath, and brought pardon even to a criminal who met them by accident. All this, whether fact or legend, was a tacit recognition of the judgment, purity, and insight of woman. It might not be desirable to give her any rights civil or social, but, as a sort of compensation, men quieted their consciences and gave themselves a comfortable feeling of being just, if indeed they ever had any doubt on that point, by offering her more or less theoretical honor, and a shadowy place near the gods, where they could avail themselves of her wisdom without any personal inconvenience. In addition to this, they built her a little temple dedicated to the goddess Viriplaca, Appeaser of Husbands, where she could solace her bruised heart by confiding her wrongs and sorrows to this conciliatory divinity, who seems to have been useful mainly as a repository of tears, though her office was to compose differences. It has long since vanished, but it speaks volumes for the helplessness of women that it ever existed at all. It told the tragedy of many a Roman matron’s life.

II

We have seen a little of what these women were and what they did. What they suffered can be better gathered from a glance at their position and the share they had in the liberties they had done so much to foster and save. Of freedom the Roman woman of earlier times had none at all, though she was not secluded like her Athenian sisters, and her place in the family was a better one. Her character was formed, like that of our Puritan mothers, in times of toil and danger, when she worked side by side with men for a common end, and, in both, their strength of purpose and spirit of heroic sacrifice lasted long after the hard conditions of primitive life had passed. Besides, the natural talent for administration which shone through all her limitations was to a certain degree recognized by her husband, and she was often his counselor, as well as the instructor of his children, even beyond the seven years prescribed. But all this did not suffice to give her any liberty of thought or action, and she was to all intents and purposes a slave, subject to the caprices of a master who might choose to be kind, though, in case he did not, she had no protection either in law or custom; and we all know how soon the consciousness of absolute power warps the sensibilities of even the gentlest. “Created to please and obey,” says Gibbon, “she was never supposed to have reached the age of reason and experience.” She was under guardianship all her life, first of her father, then of her husband, and, at his death, of her nearest male relative. For centuries she had no right to her own property, no control of her own person, no choice in marriage, no recourse against cruelty and oppression. “The husband has absolute power over the wife,” said the stern old Cato; “it is for him to condemn and punish her for any shameful act, such as taking wine or violating the moral law.” To show what was possible in the way of surveillance, we are told that he was in the habit of kissing her, when he came home, to satisfy himself that she had not been drinking. One man who found his wife sipping wine beat her to death; another dismissed his weaker half because she was seen on the street without a veil; and a daring woman was sent away because she went to the circus without leave. Any man could spend his wife’s money, beat her, sell her, give her to some one else when he was tired of her, even put her to death, “acting as accuser, judge, jury, and executioner.” In the last case it was better to call her friends into council, perhaps even necessary, if they were powerful enough to ask for an explanation; but “a man can do as he likes with his own” was sufficient to cover any injustice or any crime. Even in the last days of the Republic, when the laws were greatly modified, the younger Cato, a man noted for his stoical virtues, gave his wife to his friend Hortensius, and after his death took her back—with a dowry added. What she thought of the matter signified little. It does not appear that she was even consulted. The family was the unit, and the man was the family.

It is fair to say that it was not women alone who suffered from this peculiar phase of Roman society, as men had little more freedom so long as their fathers lived; but it fell much more severely on those who were, in the nature of things, more helpless. The best they could hope for was a change of masters, which might be for the worse; and who was to protect them from their irresponsible protectors, even with all the safeguards supposed to be provided by law? For this evidently put them where Terence did the philosophers, along with horses and hunting-dogs, that were owned but not necessarily considered.

It is said, in praise of the morals of Rome during its first centuries, that there was not a divorce for five hundred years. The exact nature of this merit is seen more clearly when we find that a woman could not apply for a divorce, or expect a redress of any wrong, whatever might befall her; while a man simply sent away his wife, if she did not please him, without any formalities, and with slight, if any, penalties. This did not release her from perpetual servitude, though he was free to follow his inclinations, amenable to no law and no obligation. It is true, however, that Roman matrons prided themselves on their dignity. A certain respect was exacted for them, and familiarity in their presence was a punishable offense. They took every occasion also to show appreciation of their defenders. They mourned a year for Brutus, who died in avenging Lucretia’s honor, and did the same later for his upright colleague.

Many years afterward there was a temple of patrician chastity in which women assembled for sacred rites, but they found as many causes for contention as some of our societies do to-day. One noble matron lost caste by marrying a plebeian, and was excluded. She protested in vain. Her birth, her spotless fame, her devotion to her husband, counted for nothing so long as that husband did not belong to the elect. There was no lack of spirited words, but the matter did not end here. This slighted Virginia started another association on her own ground, set apart a chapel in her house, and erected an altar to plebeian chastity. The standards were to be much higher. She called together the plebeian ladies, and proposed that they emulate one another in virtue, as men did in valor. No woman of doubtful honor or twice married was admitted. Unfortunately, this organization in time opened its doors too wide, and shared the fate of many others.

On another occasion Quinta Claudia, one of the leading matrons of Rome, played so conspicuous a part that she won immortality and a statue of brass. She was at the head of a delegation appointed to meet the Idæan Mother, who was expected at Terracina, and whose coming was of great importance, as various strange happenings showed conclusively that Juno was angry and needed propitiation. It was decided that the most virtuous man in the State should accompany the matrons, but it was only after much tribulation that the Senate found one fit to be intrusted with the office, and this was a young Scipio. Unfortunately, the vessel containing the image went aground, and the augurs declared that only a woman of spotless character could dislodge it. Quinta Claudia was equal to the occasion. She seized the oar, with a prayer to Cybele; the boat moved from its place as if by magic, and was safely carried to its destination. The lady’s fair fame, which had been a little clouded, was forever established by a direct interposition of the gods. The matrons acquitted themselves with honor and, it is to be hoped, to the satisfaction of the goddess, who was duly installed in her temple.

All this goes to prove that the women of twenty centuries ago often combined in the interest of religion and morals, and were quite capable of managing public as well as private affairs; also that great value was attached to the austere virtues. The wise Cato is said to have erased the name of a Roman from the list of senators because he kissed his wife in the presence of his daughters—a worse penalty than the old Blue Laws imposed on the man who kissed his wife on Sunday. It is a pity that this crabbed censor, of many theoretical virtues and a few practical ones set in thorns, failed to appreciate the dignity and decorum of the Roman matron. It was this same rigid Cato who, in spite of the fact that he “preferred a good husband to a great senator,” was so inconsistently shocked that a Roman lady should presume to be a companion to her noble lord. He looked upon a wife as a necessary evil, and declared that “the lives of men would be less godless if they were quit of women.”

There was no question of love or inclination in arranging a Roman marriage. It was simply a contract between citizens, a State affair intended solely to perpetuate the race in its purity, and to preserve family and religious traditions. In its best form it was for centuries restricted to patricians, who alone were privileged to take the mystic bread together. This constituted a religious marriage, and only this could give their children pure descent or admission to the highest functions of the State. There were two lower grades of civil marriage, but each gave a man supreme control of his wife, without the dignity of consecration. Whatever cruelty and suffering might result from this one-sided relation,—and the possibilities were enormous,—a woman was expected to love the husband chosen by her friends, for himself alone, and a bridegroom’s presents were limited by custom, so that she might not be tempted to love him for what he could give her. She must go out to meet him, submit patiently to any indignities he might offer, and mourn him in due form when he died. Her death he was not required to mourn at all. His infidelities she must never see, as any complaint was likely to meet with a dismissal, and she knew that even her father would say it served her right for interfering in any way with a man’s privilege of doing as he liked.

That a woman ever did love her husband under such conditions proves that her heart was as tender as her capacity for self-sacrifice was great; also that men were by no means as wicked or tyrannical as they had the power to be. We know that liberty is not always insured by an edict, nor does cruelty or injustice invariably follow the lack of a decree against it. There are many notable instances of the devotion of Roman women and the affection of Roman men; indeed, it is quite certain that there was a great deal of happy domestic life. Men naturally accepted the traditions of a society into which they had been born, and women did not question them unless their burdens became intolerable, and even these they considered a part of their destiny, as good women had done before them—and have done since. But power is a dangerous gift for the best of us, and without some strong safeguard, moral or legal, brute force inevitably asserts itself over helplessness. In modern times a sentiment grown into a tradition has done much toward tempering the condition of women even under arbitrary rule, though their own increased intelligence has done more. Sentiment, however, was not a quality of the average Roman character. Men were masterful and passionate, eager of power and impatient of contradiction. To offset this, they often had a strong family feeling and a certain sense of justice, besides a natural love of peace in the home; but this did not suffice to curb the violence and cruelty of the wicked, nor to render the position of the high-spirited wife a possible one. The stuff out of which Lucretias and Cornelias are made is not the stuff to bear habitual oppression silently, beyond a certain point.

It was doubtless this oppression that was responsible for a startling epidemic of husband-poisoning in the fourth century before Christ. The women who prepared the drugs were betrayed by a maid, and one hundred and seventy matrons—some of them patricians—were found guilty. The leaders were forced to take their own poisons, and died with the calmness of Stoics. Two hundred years afterward there was another epidemic of the same sort, and many eminent men paid the penalty of their cruelties with their lives. This mode of redressing wrongs became too common to be passed to the account of individual crime. It was the protest of helpless ignorance that had found no other weapon.

About this time, however, the Roman matrons took a more civilized and rational method of asserting their rights. It was an innovation to claim any, but they were too proud to accept the hopeless vassalage of the Athenian woman. Indignant at the inferiority of their condition, without recourse or refuge against cruelty and injustice, hampered by needless and petty restrictions, they rebelled at last.

III

One sees little clearly through the mists of two thousand years, and we know few details of what seems to have been the first concerted revolt on the part of women. The visible cause was a trivial one, but it was the proverbial last drop, and served at least to bring dismay into the councils of men, and afterward, possibly, reflection. The Roman woman was patriotic and quite ready, at need, to give all and ask nothing. When money was required to carry on the Punic wars, she poured out her jewels and personal treasures with lavish generosity; nor did she murmur when the Oppian law decreed that she must no longer wear purple or many-colored robes, that her gold ornaments must weigh no more than half an ounce, and that she must walk if she went out, as the use of a carriage in the city was a forbidden luxury. These were small privileges, but they were about all she had, and when the crisis was past, she asked a repeal of the decree. She met the usual rebuff of those who seek to regain a lost point. Men saw in such a request only an “irruption of female emancipators,” dangerous alike to religion and the State. Cato, the austere, refused a petition which he regarded as a subversion of order and a rebellion against lawful masters. He said that the claim of women to any rights or any voice in public affairs was a proof that men had lost their majesty as well as their authority; such a thing could not have happened if each one had kept his own wife in proper subjection. “Our privileges,” he continues, “overpowered at home by female contumacy, are, even here in the forum, spurned and trodden under foot”; indeed, he begins to fear that “the whole race of males may be utterly destroyed by a conspiracy of women.” He rails at the matrons, who throng the forum, for “running into public and addressing other women’s husbands.” It “does not concern them what laws are passed or repealed.” He bewails the “good old days” when women were forced to obey their fathers, brothers, or husbands. “Now they are so lost to a sense of decency as to ask favors of other men.” “Women,” he says, “bear law with impatience.” They long for liberty, which is not good for them. With all the old restrictions, it is difficult to keep them within bounds. “The moment they have arrived at equality they will be our superiors”—a dangerous admission surely. He calls the affair a sedition, an insurrection, a secession of women.

But the matrons had some able defenders. Lucius Valerius, who had asked the repeal of this obnoxious law, spoke for them. He objects to calling a natural request by such hard names, and quotes from antiquity to prove that it is not a new thing for Roman matrons to come out in public, as they have often done so in the interest of the State, and “always to its advantage.” He recalls the various times when they saved Rome, and refers to the generosity with which they invariably responded to a call for help. No one objected when they appeared for the general good; why should they be censured when they asked a favor for themselves? In reply to the accusation of extravagance, he says: “When you wear purple on your own robe, why will you not permit your wife a purple mantle?”... “Will you spend more on your horse than on your wife?” Then he asks why women who have always been noted for modesty should lose it now through the repeal of a law that has not been in existence more than twenty years. One is tempted to quote at length from these speeches, because they show us how the Romans discussed certain questions that are familiar to-day. To be sure, it was only a woman’s privilege of dressing as she chose that they were considering, but it really involved her right to ask anything which her lord and master did not freely accord. We hear practically the same arguments, the same fears, the same special pleadings on both sides, at each new step in the social advancement of women.

The Roman matrons, however, were not discouraged by criticism. They flocked to the forum in greater numbers than ever. Women came in from the towns and villages to aid them. The senators were so astounded at their audacity that they solemnly implored the gods to reveal the nature of the omen. They stigmatized the leaders as “androgynes” or “he-women,” a term of contempt so freely applied in this country, less than fifty years ago, to those who bravely presented the claims of their sex to larger consideration, and who, silver-haired and venerable, are so widely honored to-day. We do not hear that there were any congresses or conventions, but these Roman ladies held meetings, went into the streets for votes, and appealed to nobles, officials, and strangers alike. They sought the tribunes in their houses, and used all their arts of persuasion. There were fair-minded men then as now, and the spirited rebels won their cause, though Cato revenged himself for his defeat by imposing a heavy tax on the dress, ornaments, and carriages of women. It is said that they put on their gay robes and jewels at once, and celebrated their victory by dancing in the legislative halls.

Not far from this time, possibly a little before, a dowry was set apart for women. But there was a growing jealousy of their increasing independence, and, a few years later, it was proposed to take away from them the right of inheritance. It was feared that too much property might fall into their hands, as had been the case in Sparta; also, that their taste for elegant living might lead to degeneracy of manners and morals. The irrepressible Cato again came to the front and declaimed against the arrogance and tyranny of rich women. After bringing their husbands a large dowry, he said, they even had the presumption to retain some of their own money for themselves and ask payment if they lent it to their masters! Men could not be expected to tolerate such insufferable insolence on the part of their “reserved slaves.” And so the decree was passed. But it was more honored in the breach than in the observance, and became a dead letter, as men themselves thought it unjust.

How far the gradual change in the laws was due to the efforts of women and how far to the justice of men, it is not easy to determine; but the astonished attitude of the latter when they felt that their time-honored supremacy was in peril shows better than anything else the real significance of the movement which was precipitated by so slight a cause. It is quite safe to say that without an emphatic protest there would have been no thought of justice. Traditions are only broken from the inside where they press heavily. In this case it was a daring and unheard-of thing to run against the current of centuries of passive submission; but “it is the first step that costs.” When the right of being heard had been once asserted, grave statesmen and jurists took up the matter and solved it as best they could, with an evident desire to be just and kind, as they understood it. It could hardly be expected that half of the human family would voluntarily relinquish the absolute ownership of the other half, or even believe it to be good for the other half that they should do so. Men are not so constituted. The institutions and customs that had come to them from their fathers they felt bound to pass on, as far as possible, intact. Besides, all vital changes must be slow, unless they are to be chaotic. But the leaven of a new intelligence worked surely, if not swiftly.

The masses of the Roman women never passed out of a condition which we should call subjection, though they did secure at last the use of their own fortunes, relative freedom in the marriage contract, and a certain protection against money-hunting and spendthrift husbands. In the reign of Augustus the wife was given a guaranty for her own property, and the husband was forbidden to alienate the dowry. The mother was in a measure freed from oppressive guardianship, which later ceased altogether. Under Hadrian she was permitted to make a will without consulting any one, also to inherit from her sons. In many regards the Romans after the Antonines were more just to women than are most of the civilized nations of to-day. But these changes were the work of centuries, and it is possible here to touch only upon a few essential points.

There was a second revolt more than a hundred years after the first, when the triumvirs levied on the rich women of Rome a tax which compelled many of them to sacrifice their jewels. They appealed to Octavia to use her influence, also to the able mother of Antony, both of whom favored them; but his wife, the Fulvia of unpleasant fame, treated them with intolerable rudeness. Again they thronged the forum; but they had made vast strides in intelligence, and this time the eloquent daughter of a famous orator was chosen to plead for them. It was no longer a simple matter of personal injustice, but also a moral question upon which thoughtful women had distinct opinions and the ability to express them. Hortensia spoke for peace. “Do not ask us,” she says, “to contribute to the fratricidal war that is rending the Republic.” Her appeal for justice recalls a plea so often heard to-day, in a form that is but slightly altered. “Why should we pay taxes,” she says, “when we have no part in the honors, the commands, the statecraft, for which you contend against each other with such harmful results?... When have taxes ever been imposed on women?” Quintilian refers to this address of a brilliant matron as worthy to be read for its excellence, and “not merely as an honor to her sex.”

These spirited and high-born women were sent home, as the others had been, but the people again came to their aid, and it was found best to limit the tax to a few who could bear the burden easily.

IV

But the most serious conflict was on the marriage question. The attitude of the Roman man has been already touched upon—an attitude as old as the world. In theory, a woman might be as chaste as Lucretia, as wise as Minerva, as near to divinity as the Vestals; in fact, she was only the servant of men’s interests or passions, and when she ceased to be a willing or at least a passive one, the trouble began. So long as marriage gave a man added dignity and somebody to rule over, with no special obligations that were likely to be inconvenient, or that could not be shaken off at will, things went smoothly enough on his side. But when he had to deal with a being who demanded some consideration, perhaps some sacrifice, it was another affair. His privileges were seriously curtailed. If he married wealth, it was quite possible for the owner to become imperious and exacting, as it was not so easy to put away a wife when one must return her fortune. “I have sold my authority for the dowry I have accepted,” says Plautus. As to marrying from inclination, a man had little more freedom of action than a maiden, while his father lived. If he was a patrician he must marry within a limited class, much as he might like to go outside of it; and so long as this law continued to exist, the penalty for violating it was too severe to be braved. Besides, there were cares and restrictions in the marriage relation for pleasure-loving men. Wives without fortunes might be less exacting, but they were more expensive, which was worse, since men preferred to spend their money on themselves—a state of affairs toward which a certain class is rapidly drifting to-day, if it is not there already. Statesmen began to be alarmed. “If it were possible to do without wives, great cares would be spared us,” said Metellus in an address to the Senate; “but since nature has decreed that we cannot live without a wife, nor comfortably with one, let us bear the burden manfully, and look to the perpetuity of the State rather than to our own satisfaction.” It never seems to have occurred to these consistent descendants of Adam to consider the burdens of the woman at all. On her side, a rich woman hesitated to take a master, if she was independent enough to have any choice, which was rare, and without a dowry she was quite sure of finding a capricious one, who would not scruple to neglect her. Some guaranties she must have, and these men did not like to give. So men and women alike combined against the existing order of things, men for the right to do precisely as they pleased, women for the right of choice in husbands and of breaking chains when they became intolerable.

It has often been stated, by moralists over-anxious to make out a case, that this aversion to marriage, on the part of men, was due to the laxity of women. Of this I do not find any evidence. It was due in part to the restrictions already mentioned, and in part to the increasing luxury which, added to the long habit of absolute power, led to impatience of any domestic obligations, and a riot of the senses, as it has always done, before and since. Besides, there were the brilliant Oriental women who began to flock to Rome, bringing with them Hellenic tastes, with subtle fascinations that stole away the hearts of men and threatened a state of affairs similar to that which existed in Athens. This the spirited Roman women could not tolerate. To be thrust by strangers into a secondary place was not to be thought of by these proud patricians, who refused to put themselves in a position where such neglect was possible. They began to realize that the old virtues did not suffice to hold men’s wandering fancies. It was very well to carve on a woman’s tombstone, as a last word of praise, an epitaph like this: “Gentle in words, graceful in manner; she loved her husband devotedly; she kept her house, she spun wool.” But what availed it when this husband left her to the companionship of her duties and her virtues, while he gave what he called his affections to those who had fewer virtues and more accomplishments? It was not laxity of morals, but lack of intelligence and culture, that stood in the way of the Roman woman in the days when Greek literature, Greek art, and Greek refinement first came into fashion. That she protested against traditions which made it superfluous, if not dangerous, to cultivate her intellect, may fairly be assumed. But she had a powerful ally. On this point the Romans showed far more wisdom than the Greeks. When they saw their own daughters set aside for these fascinating rivals, they began to educate them.

Just when the movement toward things of the intellect began among Roman women, it is difficult to determine with any exactness. It was after the Eastern wars and probably about the time of the first revolt. It had not been long since men began to catch the spirit of Greek culture. For five hundred years after the foundation of Rome there was not a book written, nor even a poem or a song. As soon as men began to study and think, women were disposed to do the same thing. If they could not well fight, they had the ability to learn. The pretensions of sex were not emphasized, but individual attainment was not without recognition. We begin to find women who were noted not only for strength, wisdom, and administrative ability, but for literary taste and culture. The austere virtues of Cornelia, who lived in the second century before our era, are among the familiar facts of history. She has been often quoted as the supreme exemplar of the crowning grace of womanhood, and we know that she was honored at her death with a statue dedicated to the “Mother of the Gracchi.” Of her refinement, knowledge, and love of letters, less has been said, but it was largely because of these that she was able to train great sons. Cicero, who pronounced her letters among the purest specimens of style extant in his time, dwells upon the fact that these sons were educated in the purity and elegance of their mother’s language. Quintilian says that the “mother, whose learned letters have come down to posterity, contributed greatly to their eloquence.” Her passion for Hellenic poetry and philosophy was well known. It was a part of her heritage from her father, the illustrious Scipio, a great general with the tastes and abilities of a great scholar. Cato found fault with him and said he must be brought down to republican equality. This fiery radical and economist, who hated luxury, reviled women who had opinions, preached morals which he did not possess, whipped his slaves if anything was lost or spoiled, sold them at auction when they were sick or old, and put them to death if they did not please him,—this censor who was so generally disagreeable that when he died a wit said, “Pluto dreaded to receive him because he was always ready to bite,”—could not tolerate a man of refinement who shaved every day and patronized Greek learning, whatever glory he might reflect on his country. We do not know what he said about Cornelia, but it may be imagined, as he was the determined adversary of feminine culture.

The woman who brought up the Gracchi, and was so proud to show these “jewels” to her finery-loving friends, was no pedant, but in her last desolate years, when she was left alone with all her tragical memories, her hospitable home at Misenum was a center for learned Greeks and men of intellectual distinction. She was a woman of great force of character, and the composure with which she bore her misfortune, and talked of the deeds and sufferings of her sons, was sometimes thought to show a lack of sensibility. Plutarch, with his usual insight and cordial appreciation of women, said it indicated rather a lack of understanding on the part of the critics that they did not know the value of “a noble mind and liberal education” in supporting their possessor under sorrow and calamity. This heroic mother of heroic sons, who “refused Ptolemy and a crown,” was the first Roman matron of distinguished intellectual attainments of whom we have any definite knowledge, and the finest feminine representative of her age. Within the next century there were many others more or less prominent in social life.

With the advance in education many of the obstacles to marriage were removed, and the dangers that had lurked in the ignorance of Athenian women were averted. But the problem never ceased to be a troublesome one. With the increase of wealth men grew more self-indulgent, and less inclined to incur obligations of any sort. The despair of Augustus had its humorous side. He exhausted his wit in devising means to induce men to marry. In vain he gave honor and freedom to the married, exacted fresh penalties from bachelors, who were forbidden to receive bequests, and made laws against immorality. Fathers had precedence everywhere—in affairs, at the theater, in public offices. “For less rewards than these thousands would lose their lives,” he said. “Can they not tempt a Roman citizen to marry a wife?” Some who wished the privileges without the troubles compromised the matter by entering into formal contracts with children four or five years of age. Others took a wife for a year to comply with the law, and then dismissed her.

It is not the purpose here to pursue in detail this phase of Roman life, nor to trace the slow and obscure changes in the laws that followed the revolt of women from ages of oppression. This brief outline suffices to show that the women of two thousand years ago were far from accepting abject subservience without a protest; that they had the spirit and intelligence to combine in their own defense; that they won the privilege of virtually the same education which was given to men, and so much consideration that the Romans of the third and fourth centuries were more just to a woman’s rights of property than were the Americans in the first half of the nineteenth. Happily better counsels prevail here to-day; but it is a commentary on the instability of human affairs that, even on the higher plane of morals and intelligence from which we started, the battle had to be fought over again.

THE “NEW WOMAN” OF OLD ROME

· Wickedness of Imperial Days ·
· The Reverse of the Picture ·
· Parallel between the Romans and Ourselves ·
· Their “New Woman” ·
· Her Political Wisdom · Her Relative Independence ·
· Literature in the Golden Age ·
· Horace · Ovid ·
· Tributes to Cultivated Women in Letters of Cicero ·
· Literary Circles · Opinions of Satirists ·
· Reaction on Manners ·
· Tributes in Letters of Pliny and Seneca ·
· Glimpses of Family Life in Correspondence of Marcus Aurelius and Fronto ·
· Public Honors to Women ·

I

A great deal has been said of the Roman women of imperial days. Much of it is not to their credit, but the bad are apt to be more striking figures than the good, and to overshadow them in a long perspective. The world likes to put its saints in a special category, and worship them from afar. It seems fitting that they should sing hymns and pray for suffering humanity in a cloistral seclusion, but they are rarely quoted as representative of their age. On the other hand, it holds up its brilliant or high-placed sinners as examples to be shunned; but it talks about them and lifts them on a pedestal to show us how wicked they are, until in the course of centuries they come to be looked upon as representing the women of their time, when in fact they represent only its worst type. Two thousand years hence, no doubt a few conspicuous women noted to-day for brilliancy, beauty, or special gifts, rather than for flawless character, will stand out in more luminous colors than the great mass of refined and cultivated ones who have dazzled their generation less and graced it more. Possibly they may even furnish a text on which some strenuous moralist of the fortieth century will expatiate, with illustrations from our big-lettered journals, to show the corruption of our manners and the dangers that lie in the cultivation of feminine intellect! And yet we know that the moral standards of the world were never so high as in these days when the influence of women in the mass is greater than ever before.

Of the colossal wickedness of imperial Rome there is no question, and sinners were not rare among women. But the Julias and Messalinas did not represent the average tone of Roman society, any more than the too numerous examples of vice in high places reflect the average morality of the great cities of to-day. A careful study of those times reveals, beneath the surface of the life most conspicuous for its brilliancy and its vices, a type of womanhood as strong and heroic as we find in primitive days, with the added wisdom, culture, and helpfulness which had grown out of the freer development of the intellect.

The Romans of the last century of the Republic had, like ourselves, their corrupt politicians, their struggles for office, their demagogues, and their wars for liberty—meaning their own. They had also their plutocrats, their parvenus, their love of glittering splendor, their rage for culture, their patrons of art, who brought the masterpieces over the seas, and, not least, their “new woman.” I use the phrase in its best, not in its extreme, sense; the exaggeration of a good type is always a bad one. This last product of a growing civilization did not claim political rights or industrial privileges, as we understand them; she did not write books of any note, or seek university honors in cap and gown; nor did she combine in world-wide organizations to better herself and other people: but she did a great many things in similar directions, that were quite as new and vital to the world in which she lived. If she did not say much about the higher education, she was beginning to have a good deal of the best that was known. The example of the learned as well as virtuous and womanly Cornelia had not been lost. It was no longer sufficient to say, in the language of an old epitaph, that a woman was “good and beautiful, an indefatigable spinner, pious, reserved, chaste, and a good housekeeper.” The conservative matron still prided herself on these qualities which had so long constituted the glory of her sex, but it was decreed that she must have something more. In the new order of things, she shared in the cultivation of the intellect, and ignorance had lost its place among the virtues. Girls were educated with boys, read the same books, and studied the same subjects. To keep pace with the age, a woman must be familiar with Greek as well as Roman letters. She must also know how to sing and dance. “This helps them to find husbands,” says Statius, who had little money to give his daughter, but felt sure she could marry well because she was a “cultivated woman.” The line of co-education, however, was drawn at singing and dancing, where it began with us. In earlier times these accomplishments and the knowledge of various languages were among the attractions of the courtezan.

The new Roman woman did not live her life apart from men, any more than did the women of the old régime. Probably it never occurred to her that it would be either pleasant or desirable to do so. She simply wished to be considered as a peer and companion. Nor does she seem to have been aggressive in public affairs. If she busied herself with them, it was in counsels with men, and her influence was mainly an indirect one. She had freed herself from some of the worst features of an irresponsible masculine rule, but she was still in leading-strings, though the strings were longer and gave her a little more freedom of movement. There were many women of the newer generation who added to the simple virtues of the home the larger interests of the citizen, and conspicuous political wisdom as well as great intelligence. We first hear of them in councils of State through the letters of Cicero, who gossiped so agreeably, and at times so critically, of passing events. He speaks of the companions and advisers he found with Brutus at Antium, among whom were the heroic Portia, wife of the misguided leader, his sister Tertulla, and his mother Servilia, a woman of high attainments and masterful character, who had been the lifelong friend of Cæsar. The influence of this able and accomplished matron over the great statesman did not wane with her beauty, as it lasted to the end, though she could not save him from the fatal blow dealt by her son. The tongue of scandal did not spare her, but at this time she was old and past the suspicion of seeking to gain her purposes by the arts of coquetry. Cicero feared her power, as her force of intellect and masculine judgment had great weight in the discussions of these self-styled patriots. She even went so far as to engage to have certain important changes made in a decree of the Senate, which, for a woman, was going very far indeed. One is often struck with the fact that so many great Romans chose their women friends for qualities of intellect and character rather than for youth or beauty. When ambition is uppermost it has a keen eye for those who can minister to it, and a woman’s talents, so lightly considered before, begin to have their due appreciation. To a friend who said to Cæsar that certain things were not very easy for a woman to do, he simply replied: “Semiramis ruled Assyria, and the Amazons conquered Asia.” It is known that he paid great deference to his mother, the wise and stately Aurelia, to whose careful training he owed so much. Later, women publicly recommended candidates for important offices. Seneca acknowledged that he owed the questorship to his aunt, who was one of the most modest and reserved as well as intelligent of matrons. “They govern our houses, the tribunals, the armies,” said a censor to the Senate. If their counsels were not always for the best,—and even men are not infallible,—they were usually in the interest of good morals and good government.

Nor was it uncommon for the Roman woman to plead her own cause in the forum. There was a senator’s wife who appeared often in the courts, and her name, Afrania, was applied to those who followed her example. The only speech that has come down to us was the celebrated plea of Hortensia for her own sex. This was much praised, not only by great men of that day but in after times. It showed breadth of intellect and a firm grasp of affairs. The privilege of speaking in the forum was withdrawn on account of the violence of a certain Calphurnia—an incident that might suggest a little wholesome moderation to some of our own councils and too zealous reformers. There were also sacerdotal honors open to aspiring women. The Flaminica Augustalis offered sacrifices for the people on city altars, and the services of various divinities were always in the charge of women. There was no systematized philanthropy such as we have to-day, but we hear of much private beneficence. Women founded schools for girls and institutions for orphans. They built porticos and temples, erected monuments and established libraries; indeed, their gifts were often recognized by statues in their honor. We hear of societies of women who discuss city affairs and consider rewards to be conferred on magistrates of conspicuous merit. The names of others appear in inscriptions on tombs; but their mission is not clear. There were also women who practised medicine; this, however, may not have implied great knowledge in an age when science, as we understand it, was unknown.

II

But a clearer idea of the representative Roman woman on her intellectual side, and of the estimation in which she was held, is gathered through her relation to the world of letters, and in the glimpses of a sympathetic family life which we find in the private correspondence of some great men.

In the golden age of Augustus politics had ceased to be profitable or even safe, and the educated classes turned to literature for occupation and amusement, when they did not turn to something worse. It was the fashion to patronize letters, and every idler prided himself on writing elegant verses. In the words of Horace:

Now the light people bend to other aims;
A lust of scribbling every breast inflames;
Our youth, our senators, with bays are crowned,
And rhymes eternal as our feasts go round.

Even Augustus wrote bad epigrams and a worse tragedy. Public libraries were numerous,—there were twenty-nine,—and busts of great masters were placed beside their works. Authors were petted and flattered, and they flattered their patrons in turn. These were the days when Horace lived at his ease on his Sabine farm, gently satirizing the follies and vices that were preparing the decay of this pleasure-loving world, posing a little perhaps, and taking a lofty tone toward the courtly Mæcenas and his powerful master, who honored the brilliant poet and were glad to let him do as he liked. “Do you know that I am angry with you for not addressing to me one of your epistles?” wrote Augustus. “Are you afraid that posterity will reproach you for being my friend? If you are so proud as to scorn my friendship, that is no reason why I should lightly esteem yours in return.” The epistle came, but the little gray-haired man, who saw so clearly and wrote so wisely, went on his way serenely among his own hills, stretching himself lazily on the grass by some ruined temple or running stream, and sending pleasant though sometimes caustic words to the friends he would not take the trouble to go and see unless peremptorily summoned. Such was the relation between the ruler of the world and those who conferred distinction on his reign. Ovid discoursed upon love, and became a lion, until he forgot to confine himself to theory, and went a step too far in practice. Then he was sent away from his honored place among the gilded youth who basked in the smiles of an emperor’s granddaughter, to meditate on the vanity of life and the uncertainty of fame, by the desolate shores of the Euxine.

In this blending of literature and fashion women had a prominent place, though not as writers. No woman of the educated class could write for money, and talent of that sort, even if she had it, would have brought her little consideration. Whatever she may have done in that direction was like foam on the crest of a wave. It vanished with the moment. At a later period there were a few who wrote poetry of which a trace is left. Balbilla, who was taken to Egypt in the train of Hadrian and the good Empress Sabina, went out to hear the song with which Memnon greeted his mother Aurora at dawn, and scratched some verses on the statue in honor of her visit. Possibly they were only the flattering trifles of a clever courtier, but they were graven on stone and outlasted many better things. Of wider fame was Sulpicia, the wife of a noted man in the reign of Domitian, who wrote a poem on “Conjugal Love,” also a satire on an edict banishing the philosophers, fragments of which still exist. She had the old Roman spirit, but was less conciliatory than the eloquent Hortensia of an earlier day, who was tired of the brutalities of war. She mourned the degeneracy of the age, calling for “reverses that will awaken patriotism, yes, reverses to make Rome strong again, to rouse her from the soft and enervating languor of a fatal peace.” The able but wicked Agrippina, of tragical memory, wrote the story of her life which gave to Tacitus many facts and points for his “Annals.” Doubtless there were other things that went the way of the passing epigrams and verses of Augustus and his elegant courtiers. Twenty centuries hence who will ever hear of the thousands, yes, millions of more or less clever essays and poems written by men and women to-day and multiplied indefinitely by a facile press? What will the future antiquarian who searches the pages of a nineteenth-century anthology know of us, save that every man and woman wrote, but nothing lived, except perhaps a volume or two from the work of a few poets, essayists, and historians, who can be counted on one’s fingers? Oh, yes; there are the novelists whose value is measured by figures and dollars, who multiply as the locusts do. Fine as we may think them to-day, how many of their books will survive the sifting of time? They may be piled in old libraries, but who will take the trouble to dive into a mass that literally has no bottom? Will the world forget that women did anything worth preserving? Yet our women are educated; some of them are scholars, most of them are intelligent; many write well, and a few surpassingly well.

But if women did not write, they used their influence to find a hearing for those who did. Of the learning of the time they had their share, though it may not have been very profound. Ovid tells us that “there are learned fair, a very limited number; another set are not learned, but they wish to be so.” He writes of a gay world which is not too decorous or too serious, but in the category of a woman’s attractions he mentions as necessary a knowledge of the great poets, both Greek and Latin, among whom he modestly counts himself. Women of fashion had poets or philosophers to read or talk to them, even at their toilets, while the maids brushed their hair. They discussed Plato and Aristotle as we do Browning and economics. They dabbled in the mysteries of Isis and Osiris as we do in theosophy and Buddhism; speculated on Christianity as we do on lesser faiths, and began to doubt their falling gods. Philosophy was “the religion of polite society,” but women have always been drawn toward a faith that appeals to the emotions. Then there were the recitations and public readings, in which they were actors as well as listeners.

We have glimpses of the more seriously intellectual side of the Roman woman in the private letters of Cicero, which show us also the pleasant family life that gives us the best test of its value and sincerity. The brilliant orator seems to have had a special liking for able and accomplished matrons. In his youth he sought their society in order to polish and perfect his style. He speaks in special praise of Lælia, the wife of Scævola with whom he studied law, also of her daughter and granddaughters—all of whom excelled in conversation of a high order; he refers often to Cærellia, a woman of learning and talent, with whom he corresponded for many years; and he says that Caius Curio owes his great fame as an orator to the conversations in his mother’s house. Many other women he mentions whose attainments in literature, philosophy, and eloquence did honor to their sex and placed them on a level with the great men of their time. This was in the late days of the Republic, when genuine talent was not yet swamped in the pretensions of mediocrity.

The praise of his daughter Tullia is always on his lips. She was versed in polite letters, “the best and most learned of women,” and he valued her companionship beyond anything in life. It seems that she was unfortunate in husbands, and they gave him a good deal of trouble; but when she died the light went out of his world. His letters are full of tears, and he plans the most magnificent of monuments. He would deify her, and draw from all writers, Greek and Latin, to transmit to posterity her perfections and his own boundless love. But precious time was lost in dreams of the impossible, and swift fate overtook him before any of them crystallized. Instead of the splendid temple that was to last forever, only a few crumbling stones of his villa on the lonely heights of Tusculum are left to-day to recall the young, beautiful, and gifted woman in whose “sweet conversation” the great statesman could “drop all his cares and troubles.” Here she looked for the last time across the Campagna upon the shining array of marbles, columns, and palaces that were the pride of Rome in its glory, and went away from it all, leaving behind her a fast vanishing name, the fragrance of a fresh young life, and a desolate heart.

But if these charming pictures reveal a sympathetic side of the intimate life of the new age, they give us also the shadows that were creeping over it. The great man, who said so many fine things and did so many weak ones, has always a tender message for the little Attica, the daughter of his friend, but he fears the fortune-hunters, and objects to a husband proposed for her, because he has paid court to a rich woman who is old and has been several times married. For his own wife, Terentia, he has less consideration. She is not facile enough, and finds too much fault with his way of doing things. Perhaps she presses her influence too far, and fails to pay proper deference to his authority. To be sure, he calls her “my light, my darling,” says she is in his thoughts night and day, praises her ability, and trusts her judgment until his affairs begin to go wrong. All this, however, does not prevent his sending her away after thirty years of devotion, and marrying his lovely young ward, who is rich enough to pay his debts. The latter is divorced in turn because she does not sufficiently mourn the loss of his idolized daughter, and his closing years are burdened with the care of restoring her dowry, which draws from him many a bitter complaint. There is a strange note of irony in the tone of the much-married, much-sinning, and perfidious Antony, who publicly censures the “Father of his Country” for repudiating a wife with whom he has grown old. But the high-spirited Terentia solaced herself with his friend Sallust, and married one or two others after his death. Evidently no hearts were broken, as she lived some years beyond a century.

In the literary circles of a later generation we hear of noble ladies of serious tastes meeting to converse about the poets. Juvenal and Martial ridiculed them as Molière did the Précieuses centuries afterward. “I hate a woman who never violates the rules of grammar, and quotes verses I never knew,” says Juvenal. “A husband should have the privilege of committing a solecism.” He objects to being bored at supper with impertinent questions about Homer and Vergil, or misplaced sympathy with the unhappy Dido, who, no doubt, ought to have taken her desertion philosophically instead of making it so unpleasant for her hero lover. He even suggests that women blessed with literary tastes should put on the tunics of the bolder sex and do various mannish things which are sometimes recommended by the satirists of to-day. It is with a sigh of regret that he recalls the “good old days of poverty and morals,” when it was written on a woman’s tombstone that she “spun wool and looked after her house.” “A good wife is rarer than a white crow,” is his amiable conclusion.

All this goes to prove that in the first century women passed through the same ordeal of criticism as they have in the nineteenth. The satirists of to-day are no kinder to the Dante and Browning clubs, and mourn equally over the “good old days” when they were in no danger of a rival or a critic at the breakfast-table. Doubtless that age had its little pretensions and affectations, as every other great age has had—not excepting our own. There were women who talked platitudes about things of which they knew nothing, and men who did the same thing or worse on other lines laughed at them just as men do now at similar follies, though often without the talent of a Juvenal or a Martial, and, it is fair to say, without their incredible coarseness. The coming of women into literature has made the latter practically impossible.

But even Martial had his better moments. He speaks of a young girl who has the eloquence of Plato, the austerity of the philosophers, and writes verses worthy of a chaste Sappho. One might imagine that his enthusiasm had run away with his prejudices, if Martial could be supposed to have had enthusiasms, as he warmly congratulates the friend who is to marry this prodigy. Possibly he preferred her as the wife of some one else, as he stipulates for himself, on another occasion, a wife who is “not too learned.”

There was a great deal to censure in this dilettante world. The fashionable life of Rome had drifted into hopeless corruption, in spite of the efforts of good men and women to stem the tide. Long before, the Senate had ordered a temple to Venus Verticordia, the Venus that turns hearts to virtue; but the new goddess was not eminently successful among the votaries of pleasure, who preferred to offer incense to the more beautiful and less respectable one. The old patricians had their faults and sins, but the new moneyed aristocracy was a great deal worse, as the noblesse oblige had ceased to exist, and there were no moral ideals to take the place of it. “First let us seek for fortune,” says the satirist; “virtue is of no importance. Hail to wealth!” “His Majesty Gold” was as powerful as he is to-day, and his worship was coarser. “He says silly things, but money serves for intellect,” remarks a wit of the time. Literature declined with morals. “These are only stores and shops, these schools in which wisdom is sold and supplied like goods,” said one who mourned over the degeneracy of the times. That women should suffer with the rest was inevitable. They are not faultless; indeed, they are very simply human. If they are usually found in the front ranks of great moral movements, they are not always able to stand individually against the resistless tide which we call the spirit of the age.