Part 2

You crafty one—you know it’s true; who of the gods, pray, has been plotting with you again? You know that is what you like, to get away from me and to make up your mind without me, keeping your plans secret: never yet have you had the decency to tell me outright what you mean to do.

Her husband, being a male, is far more reasonable in his tone: ‘You must not expect to know all my business, my dear: it would be too hard for you, you know, though you are my wife,’ and so on, gently putting her in her inferior place. But Hera refuses to listen to reason: ‘What do you mean by that?’ she cries. ‘I have been only too ready in the past not to ask questions, I have left you at your ease, you have done what you liked,’ and she proceeds to disclose her well-founded suspicions, until Zeus, giving up any further appeals to her better feelings, tells her bluntly to sit still and do what she is told. If not, ‘All the gods in heaven, you know, won’t be of any use to you when I come close and lay my irresistible hands upon you.’ A further edifying touch is given by the well-meant intervention of Hera’s lame son, Hephaestus, and the scene closes with the unquenchable laughter of the blessed gods.

Another similar episode is the passage in Book 14, known as ‘the beguiling of Zeus,’ or, as we might say, ‘the tricked husband.’ Hera, it begins, saw her husband sitting on Mount Ida, and abhorred the sight of him. The story can be condensed by omitting all the ornamental epithets and turns of phrase which are used to give a very un-epic passage an epic colouring, and it runs somewhat like this.

Though she detests her lord, she still has to consider how to get the better of him, and she decides to dress herself in her finest. She goes accordingly to her bower, with its close-shut doors and its secret key, fastens the bolt, and begins an elaborate toilet. It is a sure sign of the odalisque that perfumes, jewellery, adornment of every kind are lavished upon her by the very men who really regard her as a chattel, and the whole description that follows reads like a passage in the _Arabian Nights_, themselves probably a product of the same kind of Greek genius as composed these portions of the Iliad. Every detail is lovingly dwelt upon; first with ‘ambrosia’ (the author hardly troubles himself about what ambrosia really is, and uses it as a sort of trade word), she washes her lovely skin, and then she anoints herself with oil, an ‘extra-ambrosial’ sort, which has been specially perfumed for her: then she combs her hair and twists it into bright, beautiful, ‘ambrosial’ curls. Next comes the ‘ambrosial’ robe with dainty patterns upon it, pinned across the chest by golden brooches, and the corset belt with its hundred tassels, and finally the earrings shining brightly with their three pendants. The goddess is now ready, except for the last two articles of a Greek lady’s toilette, the yashmak veil and the sandals, and as she is going abroad she puts them on and calls upon Aphrodite. Being a woman, she begins with a circumlocution. ‘Dear child,’ she says, ‘I wonder whether you will say yes or no to what I have to ask.’ Aphrodite invites her to be a little more plain, and ‘the crafty’ Hera then enters into an elaborate and entirely false explanation. She wants to borrow the magic cestus of Aphrodite in order to reconcile Oceanus and mother Tethys, a pair whose matrimonial affairs have been going so badly that they are now occupying separate rooms. ‘If I could only get them together,’ she says, ‘they would ever afterwards call me their friend.’

Whether Aphrodite believes the story or not is best left unsaid, but she at once consents: ‘It is not possible or proper to refuse you, for you sleep in the arms of the mighty Zeus,’ and she hands her the cestus with all its magic powers—‘in it are love and desire and sweet dalliance and alluring words, which rob even the wise of their wits’—then with mutual smiles they separate.

All through the passage it will be noticed there is a good deal of talk about magic, the same sort of magic as we get in the _Arabian Nights_, but the effect of the cestus is really quite independent of any supernatural aid. It was an article such as may be seen to-day advertised in a fashion paper—a ‘soutiengorge’—and it produced that development of the female bust and general appearance of embonpoint, which has always seemed to Eastern nations the ideal of feminine beauty.

Binding the cestus then under her breast, Hera goes off to pay her next visit, to the god Sleep, whom she begs to send Zeus into a deep slumber. For this service she promises the god ‘a beautiful golden chair, something quite unbreakable, with a footstool attached.’ But Sleep raises difficulties. He has tried a similar trick on Zeus before at the lady’s request, and when the god awoke he was very violent, and Sleep would have been thrown out of heaven into the sea had not mother Night interfered to save him. In fine, a chair, even a golden chair, is not a sufficient reward for such a dangerous task. Hera accordingly raises her offer from a chair to a woman, and promises him one of the younger Graces as his bed-fellow. Sleep at this agrees to help, the pair go to Mount Ida, Sleep changes himself into a bird to watch the scene of beguiling, and Hera reveals herself to Zeus.

As soon as the god sees her, he asks where she is going, and she repeats again the story of Oceanus and Tethys’ misadventures and her projected intervention. But the god tells her brusquely, like a real master of the harem, that he needs her presence and that she can go there another day: then, as a climax of good taste, he recites the long list of his mistresses, beginning with Ixion’s wife and ending with Leto. To this impassioned love-making, worthy of Don Juan himself, Hera, ‘the crafty,’ replies at first with an affectation of modesty, but the scene ends with the god in her arms: her purpose is accomplished and man once again is beguiled.

Dr. Leaf finds the passage full of ‘healthy sensuousness,’ but to other readers it may well seem thoroughly unpleasant, both in its sentiment and its language—for example, the horrible reiteration of ΤΟΙ, ‘mon chéri,’ at the end of Hera’s speech of invitation. Still, it is a valuable document. The brutal god and the crafty goddess are plainly the poet’s ideals of man and woman; and his ideals are very low.

These two passages from the Iliad may serve as specimens of the second method of attack, that of sarcastic depreciation under the guise of realism, of which we have some further examples in Hesiod.

The strange medley that now bears his name is in the same position as the Iliad. There is much ancient wisdom, in which woman has little part. ‘Get first a house, and then a woman, and then a ploughing ox,’ and there are also many passages plainly inspired by the new Ionian spirit.

The few facts that we know of Hesiod’s life would suggest that he was an Ionian poet who migrated to Bœotia, and incorporated into his verse the ancient lore of the country, much of it as old as anything we have in Greek literature.

Hesiod’s father was a merchant who lived at Kyme, on the coast of Asia Minor. The son passed most of his life at Askra, but of his life we know little, of his death a good deal. He had a friend, a citizen of Miletus, who came to stay with him in Greece. The two Ionians travelling together were entertained by one Phegeus, a citizen of Locris. They repaid his hospitality by seducing his daughter: the girl committed suicide, and her brothers, taking the law into their own hands, avenged her ruin by killing both Hesiod and his friend, who indeed was said to have been the chief culprit.

This tale, which is by far the best-authenticated fact in Hesiod’s life, does not give us a very pleasant impression as to the poet’s capacity for passing judgment on women, and probably the details of the Pandora myth are his own invention. The story itself is very old, but, as told by Hesiod, it has all the sham epic machinery, while it is linked on to the ancient fable of Prometheus.

To revenge the gift of fire to men, Zeus resolves to make a woman. ‘I will give them an evil thing,’ he says; ‘every man in his heart will rejoice therein and hug his own misfortune.’ Accordingly, Hephaestus mixes the paste and fashions the doll. Athena gives her skill in weaving, Aphrodite ‘sheds charm about her head and baleful desire and passion that eats away the strength of men.’ Finally, Hermes gives her ‘a dog’s shameless mind and thieving ways.’ Then the doll is dressed with kirtle and girdle, chains of gold are hung about her body, spring flowers put upon her head, and she is sent down to earth. ‘A sheer and hopeless delusion, to be the bane of men who work for their bread.’

Epimetheus takes her to wife, and when he had got her, ‘then and then only did he know the evil thing he possessed.’ So the tale of Pandora ends, and the story of the Jar, although it comes next in the ‘Works and Days,’ is not certainly connected with her history. It is ‘a woman,’ but not necessarily Pandora, who takes the lid from the Jar of Evil Things and lets them fly free over the world, so that only one curse now remains constant.

That curse, it will be remembered, is Elpis—not so much Hope as the gambler’s belief in Luck. It is the idea that things must change for the better if you will only risk all your fortune: that the laws of the universe will be providentially altered for your benefit; the belief, in fact, that so often makes the elderly misogynist take a young wife.

Such is Hesiod’s attitude towards women, and with Hesiod the first stage of Greek literature comes to an end.

III.—THE LYRIC POETS

Of the literature of the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, the lyric, iambic and elegiac poetry, we have only inconsiderable fragments. There are two reasons for the disappearance. In the case of the greatest names, Alcæus and Sappho, the Romans preferred the adaptations of Horace to the originals. With most of the other poets, the general standard of morality in their verse is so low that they fell under the ban of the Early Church, and as we know—unreasonably enough in her case—Sappho was included with them, and her poems publicly burnt. But in the fragments that we do possess there appears unmistakably the same mixture of sensual desire and cynical distaste for women which disfigures the late Epic; until in this period it ends in sheer misogyny.

In nothing is Aristotle’s great doctrine of the golden mean more valuable than in matters of sex. The sexual appetite is as natural as the appetites of eating and drinking; and as necessary for that which is nature’s sole concern, the preservation of the species. If the sexual appetite is wholly starved, the result is as disastrous to the race as the total deprivation of food and drink would be to the individual: if it is unduly fostered, Nature revenges herself in the same way as she does upon those who exceed in the matter of food or drink, and abnormal perversities of every kind begin. In sex matters the normal man and woman alone should be considered—the father and the mother of a family—and their opinion alone is of any real value. But unfortunately in literature, and especially in this Ionian literature, the normal person is the exception, and most of the writers we now have to consider seem to have been unmarried and childless.

The paucity of material, probably no great loss either in an artistic or a moral sense, has obscured the facts, but there seems little doubt that in this period literature was definitely used for the first time to degrade the position of women. The iambic metre was invented for the express purpose of satirical calumny, and the three chief iambic poets of the Alexandrian canon, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax, in their scanty fragments all agree on one point: the chief object of their lampoons is—woman. At the beginning of this period the two sexes are fairly equal in their opportunities; at the end the female is plainly the inferior. Sappho and Erinna mark the turning-point in literature. Living at a time when it had not been made impossible for women to write, they showed that a woman could equal or surpass the male poets of her day. The few fragments of Erinna’s verse that we possess, _e.g._, the epigram on the portrait of Agatharchis and the pathetic elegy on the dead Baucis, reveal a talent at least as fine and strong as that of Alcæus; while of all the Greek lyrists, Sappho, both in reputation and as far as we can judge in actual achievement, holds by far the highest place.

Later ages, indeed, found it difficult to believe that Sappho was a woman at all. The scandal of male gossip was inspired by a genuine and pathetic belief that such a genius as hers must at least have been touched with masculine vices. But in Sappho’s writings, which are our only real evidence, there is nothing distinctively ‘mannish’: she is neither gross nor tedious. In the technique of her art, metrical skill, the music of verse, she is at least the equal of any poet who has lived since her day; in thought and diction she is far superior to all her contemporaries.

In dealing with the Ionian poetry, exact dates are impossible, but the lyric age extends roughly from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the sixth century. The earliest writer in order of time, and in some ways the most important, is Archilochus, the Burns or Villon of Greece—outlaw, soldier of fortune, poet, the first man to introduce his own personal feelings into literature.

Archilochus has his own special reasons for hating women—‘Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo’—and, as he says, he had learned the great lesson, ‘If anyone hurts you, hurt her in return.’ Betrothed to Cleobule, the daughter of a wealthy citizen of Paros, he found his marriage forbidden by the lady’s father, Lycambes. The father’s reasons may be guessed, even from the few fragments of Archilochus that still remain. But the poet turned abruptly from amorist to misogynist, and spent the rest of his life in railing against his lost mistress and womankind in general.

Both in love and war he is uncompromisingly frank. He tells us how he threw away his shield ‘_beside the bush in battle: but deuce take the shield, I will get another just as good, and at any rate I have escaped from death_.’ His love poems are equally free-spoken. It is the actual image of his mistress that torments him when he cries, ‘_With myrtle boughs and roses fair she used to delight herself_’; and again, ‘_All her back and shoulders were covered by the shadow of her hair_.’ But to his fierce spirit such love brings little comfort: ‘_Wretch that I am, like a dead man I lie, captive to desire, pierced with cruel anguish through all my bones_’; and, ‘_The longing that takes the strength from a man’s limbs, it is that which overcomes me now_.’

Soon his love turns to hate and loathing, and he imputes to the woman the fault that is really his own: ‘_I was wronged, I have sinned. Aye! and many another man, methinks, will fall like me to ruin_.’ His mistress now for him has lost her beauty. _‘No longer does your soft flesh bloom fair; even as dry leaves it begins to wither.’_ Like all women, she is false and full of guile: ‘_In one hand she carries water, in the other the fire of craft_.’ To marry a woman now is, ‘_To take to one’s house manifest ruin_.’

The folly of men and the falsity of women seem to have been the themes of the animal stories which Archilochus, like Æsop, composed. Woman is the fox; man is now the eagle, now the ape; but the fragments are too short for a certain judgment. What remains, indeed, of Archilochus is always tantalising in its incompleteness. Of his epigrams, for example, only three are left; here is a free translation of one of them: ‘Miss High-and-mighty, as soon as she became a wedded wife, kicked her bonnet over the moon.’

Fortunately, however, we have preserved for us in Herodotus a much longer specimen of Archilochus’ manner—a real Milesian tale, the story of Gyges and Candaules. The tale is handed down to us in Herodotus’ prose, and it is impossible to disentangle the shares contributed by the Ionian poet and the Ionian historian; nor is it necessary; the story is typical of both.

Candaules makes the initial mistake of being enamoured of his own wife, and the second mistake of not believing Gyges when he is enlightened on the subject of female modesty. His folly naturally brings him to a bad end.

The story is interesting, but it is especially significant when we compare it with the tale of the same Gyges as told by Plato. There the sensual elements disappear, the interest centres in the magic ring, and the seduction of the queen and murder of the king form merely the hasty conclusion of the narrative. The difference between the two stories is the measure of the difference between the feminist philosopher and the libertine turned woman-hater.

But Archilochus at least has once loved a woman. Our next poet, Simonides of Amorgos, seems to have been a misogynist from birth. His work now only exists in fragments, but it is so significant of a frame of mind that the two longest passages that survive deserve a verbatim translation. The first runs thus:

Women, they are the greatest evil that God ever created. Even if they do appear to be useful at times, they usually turn out a curse to their owners. A man who lives with a wife never gets through a whole day without trouble, and it is no easy matter for him to drive away from his house that fiend abhorred, the foul fiend, Hunger. Moreover, just when a man is thinking to be merry at home—by God’s grace or man’s service—the woman always finds some ground of fault and puts on her armour for battle. Where there is a wife, you can never entertain a guest without fear of trouble. Again, the woman who seems to be most virtuous, mind you, may well be the most mischievous of all. Her husband gapes at her in admiration, but his neighbours laugh to see him, and the mistake he is making.

Every one will praise his own wife—men are shrewd enough for that—and then will talk scandal about his neighbour’s, and all the time we do not realise that we are all in the same plight, for, as we said before, this is the greatest evil that God ever created.

The other fragment, the catalogue of women, is longer and better known. It begins:

From the first God made women’s characters different. Into one kind of woman He put the mind of a pig, lank and bristly, and in her house everything lies about in disorder, bedraggled with mud and rolling on the floor, while she herself, unwashed, in dirty clothes sits in the mire and waxes fat.

The second woman God made out of a mischievous fox. She is cunning in all things alike; she knows everything, all that is bad and all that is good; often her speech is fair, but often it is evil, and her mood changes every day.

The third sort of woman was made out of a dog, and she is the true child of her mother, ever restless. She wants to hear and know about everything; she is always peering about and roaming around, growling even though there is no one in sight. A man cannot stop her with threats; no, not even if in sudden anger he break her teeth with a stone. Soft talk is useless, too; it is all the same even if she happen to be sitting among strangers: a man finds her a continual and hopeless nuisance.

The fourth woman the gods in heaven made out of mud—or rather they half made her—and then gave her to man. Such a one knows nothing, good or bad; the only business she has sense enough for is eating. Even if God sends a bitter winter’s day and she be shivering, she never will draw her chair closer to the fire.

The fifth woman was made out of the sea, and she has two minds within her. One day she is all smiles and gladness. A stranger seeing her in the house will praise her. ‘In all the world,’ says he, ‘there is not a better or a fairer lady.’ But another day she is insupportable to look at or to approach. She is filled with fury, like a bitch guarding her cubs: savage to all alike, friends and foes, detestable. Even so the sea often stands quiet and harmless, a joy to sailors in the summer tide, and often again is driven to madness by the thunderous waves. It is to the sea that such a woman is most like.

The sixth woman was made from an ass, grey of hide and stubborn against blows. Though you use reproaches and force, it is with difficulty you get her to give way to you and do her work satisfactorily. She is always eating, day and night; she eats in her bedroom, she eats by the fireside. But if a man approaches to make love to her, she comes forward quickly enough to welcome him.

The seventh was made out of a polecat, a plaguy and a grievous kind. There is nothing fair or lovable in her, nothing pleasant, nothing charming, and any man who comes near she fills with nausea. She is a thief and annoys her neighbours, and often she gobbles up the sacrifice herself without offering any to the gods.

The eighth woman was the daughter of a mare, stepping daintily with flowing mane. She shudders at the thought of any servant’s work or labour. She will never lay her hand to the millstone, nor lift up the sieve, nor throw the dung out of doors: she won’t even sit near the kitchen stove, because she is afraid of the soot, and she makes her husband well acquainted with adversity. Every day, two or three times, she washes every speck of dirt off her, and anoints herself with unguents. Her hair is always luxuriant and well combed, with garlands of flowers upon it. Of course, such a woman is a fine sight for the men to see, but she is a curse to her owner, unless indeed he be a tyrant or sceptred king who has a fancy to pride himself on such delights.

The ninth woman came from a monkey: this sort is, indeed, pre-eminently the very greatest curse that God ever sent to men. Her features are shamefully ugly; such a woman, as she walks through a town, is a mockery to all men. She has a short neck, and moves with difficulty; she has no buttocks, her legs are all bone. Alas for the poor wretch who holds such an evil thing in his arms! But as for guile and tricks, she knows them all, and like a monkey she does not mind being laughed at. She never renders anyone a service, but all day long this is what she is seeking and looking for—how to do some one as much harm as she can.

The tenth woman was made out of a bee: happy the man who gets her! On her alone no breath of scandal lights, but she brings a life of happiness and prosperity. Husband and wife grow old together in love, and fair and glorious are her children. Famous among all women is she, and a grace divine encompasses her about. She takes no delight in sitting with other women when they are telling bawdy tales.

Such women as she are the best and wisest given by God to men: all the other kinds are a bane to men, and by God’s decree a bane they always will be.

And so the fragment ends.