Part 2

Every one knows how enthusiastic the Greeks were of beauty. They adored it in the temples. They admired it in the principal works of art. They studied it in the exercises and the games. They thought to perfect it by their marriages. They offered rewards to it at the public festivals. But virtuous beauty was seldom to be seen. The modest women were confined to their own apartments, and were visited only by their husbands and nearest relations. The courtezans offered themselves every where to view; and their beauty as might be expected, obtained universal homage.

Greece was governed by eloquent men; and the celebrated courtezans, having an influence over those orators must have had an influence on public affairs. There was not one, not even the thundering, the inflexible Demosthenes, so terrible to tyrants, but was subjected to their sway. Of that great master of eloquence it has been said, "What he had been a whole year in erecting, a woman overturned in a day." That influence augmented their consequence; and their talent of pleasing increased with the occasions of exerting it.

The laws and the public institutions, indeed, by authorizing the privacy of women, set a high value on the sanctity of the marriage vow. But in Athens, imagination, sentiment, luxury, the taste in arts and pleasures, was opposite to the laws. The courtezans, therefore may be said to have come in support of the manners.

There was no check upon public licentiousness; but private infidelity, which concerned the peace of families, was punished as a crime. By a strange and perhaps unequalled singularity the men were corrupted, yet the domestic manners were pure. It seems as if the courtezans had not been considered to belong to their sex; and, by a convention to which the laws and the manners bended, while other women were estimated merely by their virtues, they were estimated only by their accomplishments.

These reasons will in some measure, account for the honors, which the votaries of Venus so often received in Greece. Otherwise we should have been at a loss to conceive, why six or seven writers had exerted their talents to celebrate the courtezans of Athens--why three great painters had uniformly devoted their pencils to represent them on canvass--and why so many poets had strove to immortalize them in verses. We should hardly have believed that so many illustrious men had courted their society--that Aspasia had been consulted in deliberations of peace and war--that Phryne had a statue of gold placed between the statues of two kings at Delphos--that, after death, magnificent tombs had been erected to their memory.

"The traveller," says a Greek writer, "who, approaching to Athens, sees on the side of the way a monument which attracts his notice at a distance, will imagine that it is the tomb of Miltiades or Pericles, or of some other great man, who has done honor to his country by his services. He advances, he reads, and he learns that it is a courtezan of Athens who is interred with so much pomp."

Theopompus, in a letter to Alexander the Great, speaks also of the same monument in words to the following effect--"Thus, after her death, is a prostitute honored; while not one of those brave warriors who fell in Asia, fighting for you, and for the safety of Greece, has so much as a stone erected to his memory, or an inscription to preserve his ashes from insult."

Such was the homage which that enthusiastic people, voluptuous and passionate, paid to beauty. More guided by sentiment than reason, and having laws rather than principles, they banished their great men, honored their courtezans, murdered Socrates, permitted themselves to be governed by Aspasia, preserved inviolate the marriage bed, and placed Phryne in the temple of Apollo!

ROMAN WOMEN.

Among the Romans, a grave and austere people, who, during five hundred years, were unacquainted with the elegancies and the pleasures of life, and who, in the middle of furrows and fields of battle, were employed in tillage or in war, the manners of the women were a long time as solemn and severe as those of the men, and without the smallest mixture of corruption, or of weakness.

The time when the Roman women began to appear in public, marks a particular era in history.

The Roman women, for many ages, were respected over the whole world. Their victorious husbands re-visited them with transport, at their return from battle. They laid at their feet the spoils of the enemy, and endeared themselves in their eyes by the wounds which they had received for them and for the state. Those warriors often came from imposing commands upon kings, and in their own houses accounted it an honor to obey. In vain the too rigid laws made them the arbiters of life and death. More powerful than the laws, the women ruled their judges. In vain the legislature, foreseeing the wants which exist only among a corrupt people, permitted divorce. The indulgence of the polity was proscribed by the manners.

Such was the influence of beauty at Rome before the licentious intercourse of the sexes had corrupted both.

The Roman matrons do not seem to have possessed that military courage which Plutarch has praised in certain Greek and barbarian women; they partook more of the nature of their sex; or, at least, they departed less from its character. Their first quality was decency. Every one knows the story of Cato the censor, _who stabbed a Roman Senator for kissing his own wife in the presence of his daughter_.

To these austere manners, the Roman women joined an enthusiastic love of their country, which discovered itself upon many great occasions. On the death of Brutus, they all clothed themselves in mourning. In the time of Coriolanus they saved the city. That incensed warrior who had insulted the senate and priests, and who was superior even to the pride of pardoning, could not resist the tears and entreaties of the women. _They_ melted his obdurate heart. The senate decreed them public thanks, ordered the men to give place to them upon all occasions, caused an altar to be erected for them on the spot where the mother had softened her son, and the wife her husband; and the sex were permitted to add another ornament to their head-dress.

The Roman women saved the city a second time, when besieged by Brennus. They gave up all their gold as its ransom. For that instance of their generosity, the senate granted them the honor of having funeral orations pronounced in the rostrum, in common with patriots and heroes.

After the battle of Cannae, when Rome had no other treasures but the virtues of her citizens, the women sacrificed both their jewels and their gold. A new decree rewarded their zeal.

Valerius Maximus who lived in the reign of Tiberius, informs us that, in the second triumvirate, the three assassins who governed Rome thirsting after gold, no less than blood, and having already practised every species of robbery, and worn out every method of plunder; resolved _to tax the women_. They imposed a heavy contribution upon each of them. The women sought an orator to defend their cause, but found none. Nobody would reason against those who had the power of life and death. The daughter of the celebrated Hortensius alone appeared. She revived the memory of her father's abilities, and supported with intrepidity her own cause and that of her sex. The ruffians blushed and revoked their orders.

Hortensia was conducted home in triumph, and had the honor of having given, in one day, an example of courage to men, a pattern of eloquence to women, and a lesson of humanity to tyrants.

During upwards of six hundred years, the _virtues_ had been found sufficient to please. They now found it necessary to call in the _accomplishments_. They were desirous to join admiration to esteem, 'till they learned to exceed esteem itself. For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase.

A thousand causes concurred to produce this revolution of manners among the Romans. The vast inequality of ranks, the enormous fortunes of individuals, the ridicule, affixed by the imperial court to moral ideas, all contributed to hasten the period of corruption.

There were still, however, some great and virtuous characters among the Roman women. Portia, the daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus, showed herself worthy to be associated with the first of human kind, and trusted with the fate of empires. After the battle of Phillippi, she would neither survive liberty nor Brutus, but died with the bold intrepidity of Cato.

The example of Portia was followed by that of Arria, who seeing her husband hesitating and afraid to die, in order to encourage him, pierced her own breast, and delivered to him the dagger with a smile.

Paulinia too, the wife of Seneca, caused her veins to be opened at the same time with her husband's, but being forced to live, during the few years which she survived him, "she bore in her countenance," says Tacitus, "the honorable testimony of her love, a _paleness_, which proved that part of her blood had sympathetically issued with the blood of her spouse."

To take notice of all the celebrated women of the empire, would much exceed the bounds of the present undertaking. But the empress Julia the wife of Septimius Severus, possessed a species of merit so very different from any of those already mentioned, as to claim particular attention.

This lady was born in Syria, and a daughter of a priest of the sun. It was predicted that she would rise to sovereign dignity; and her character justified the prophecy.

Julia, while on the throne, loved, or pretended passionately to love, letters. Either from taste, from a desire to instruct herself, from a love of renown, or possibly from all these together, she spent her life with philosophers. Her rank of empress would not, perhaps, have been sufficient to subdue those bold spirits; but she joined to that the more powerful influences of wit and beauty. These three kinds of empire rendered less necessary to her that which consists only in art; and which, attentive to their tastes and their weaknesses, govern great minds by little means.

It is said she was a philosopher. Her philosophy, however, did not extend so far as to give chastity to her manners. Her husband, who did not love her, valued her understanding so much, that he consulted her upon all occasions. She governed in the same manner under his son.

Julia was, in short, an empress and a politician, occupied at the same time about literature, and affairs of state, while she mingled her pleasures freely with both. She had courtiers for her lovers, scholars for her friends, and philosophers for her counsellors. In the midst of a society, where she reigned and was instructed. Julia arrived at the highest celebrity; but as among all her excellencies, we find not those of her sex, the virtues of a woman, our admiration is lost in blame. In her life time she obtained more praise than respect; and posterity, while it has done justice to her talents and her accomplishments, has agreed to deny her esteem.

LAWS AND CUSTOMS RESPECTING THE ROMAN WOMEN.

The Roman women, as well as the Grecian, were under perpetual guardianship; and were not at any age, nor in any condition, ever trusted with the management of their own fortunes.

Every father had power of life and death over his own daughters: but this power was not restricted to daughters only; it extended also to sons.

The Oppian law prohibited women from having more than half an ounce of gold employed in ornamenting their persons, from wearing clothes of divers colors, and from riding in chariots, either in the city, or a thousand paces round it.

They were strictly forbid to use wine, or even to have in their possession the key of any place where it was kept. For either of these faults they were liable to be divorced by their husbands. So careful were the Romans in restraining their women from wine, that they are supposed to have first introduced the custom of saluting their female relations and acquaintances, on entering the house of a friend or neighbor, that they might discover by their breath, whether they had tasted any of that liquor.

This strictness, however, began in time to be relaxed; until at last, luxury becoming too strong for every law, the women indulged themselves in equal liberties with the men.

But such was not the case in the earlier ages of Rome. Romulus even permitted husbands to kill their wives, if they found them drinking wine.

Fabius Pictor relates, that the parents of a Roman lady, having detected her picking the lock of a chest which contained some wine, shut her up and starved her to death.

Women were liable to be divorced by their husbands almost at pleasure, provided the portion was returned which they had brought along with them. They were also liable to be divorced for barrenness, which, if it could be construed into a fault, was at least the fault of nature, and might sometimes be that of the husband.

A few sumptuary laws, a subordination to the men, and a total want of authority, do not so much affect the sex, as to be coldly and indelicately treated by their husbands.

Such a treatment is touching them in the tenderest part. Such, however we have reason to believe, they often met with from the Romans, who had not learned, as in modern times to blend the rigidity of the patriot, and roughness of the warrior, with that soft and indulging behavior, so conspicuous in our modern patriots and heroes.

Husbands among the Romans not only themselves behaved roughly to their wives, but even sometimes permitted their servants and slaves to do the same. The principal eunuch of Justinian the Second, threatened to chastise the Empress, his master's wife, in the manner that children are chastised at school, if she did not obey his orders.

With regard to the private diversions of the Roman ladies, history is silent. Their public ones, were such as were common to both sexes; as bathing, theatrical representations, horse-races, shows of wild beasts, which fought against one another, and sometimes against men, whom the emperors, in the plenitude of their despotic power, ordered to engage them.

The Romans, of both sexes, spent a great deal of time at the baths; which at first, perhaps, were interwoven with their religion, but at last were only considered as refinements in luxury. They were places of public resort, where people met with their acquaintances and friends, where public libraries were kept for such as chose to read, and where poets recited their works to such as had patience to hear.

In the earlier periods of Rome, separate baths were appropriated to each sex. Luxury, by degrees getting the better of decency, the men and women at last bathed promiscuously together. Though this indecent manner of bathing was prohibited by the emperor Adrian; yet, in a short time, inclination overcame the prohibition; and, in spite of every effort, promiscuous bathing continued until the time of Constantine, who, by the coercive force of the legislative authority, and the rewards and terrors of the Christian religion, put a final stop to it.

WOMAN IN SAVAGE LIFE.

Man, in a state of barbarity, equally cruel and indolent, active by necessity, but naturally inclined to repose, is acquainted with little more than the physical effects of love; and having none of those moral ideas which only can soften the empire of force, he is led to consider it as his supreme law, subjecting to his despotism those whom reason had made his equals, but whose imbecility betrayed them to his strength.

Cast in the lap of naked nature, and exposed to every hardship, the forms of women, in savage life, are but little engaging. With nothing that deserves the name of culture, their latent qualities, if they have any, are like the diamond, while enclosed in the rough flint, incapable of shewing any lustre. Thus destitute of every thing by which they can excite love, or acquire esteem; destitute of beauty to charm, or art to soothe, the tyrant man; they are by him destined to perform every mean and servile office. In this the American and other savage women differ widely from those of Asia, who, if they are destitute of the qualifications necessary for gaining esteem, have beauty, ornaments, and the art of exciting love.

In civilized countries a woman acquires some power by being the mother of a numerous family, who obey her maternal authority, and defends her honor and her life. But, even as a mother, a female savage has not much advantage. Her children, daily accustomed to see their father treat her nearly as a slave, soon begin to imitate his example, and either pay little regard to her authority or shake it off altogether.

Of this the Hottentot boys afford a remarkable proof. They are brought up by the women, till they are about fourteen years of age. Then, with several ceremonies they are initiated into the society of men. After this initiation is over it is reckoned manly for a boy to take the earliest opportunity of returning to the hut of his mother, and beating her in the most barbarous manner, to show that he is now out of her jurisdiction. Should the mother complain to the men, they would only applaud the boy for showing so laudable a contempt for the society and authority of women.

In the Brazils, the females are obliged to follow their husbands to war, to supply the place of beasts of burden, and to carry on their backs their children, provisions, hammocks, and every thing wanted in the field.

In the Isthmus of Darien, they are sent along with warriors and travellers, as we do baggage horses. Even their Queen appeared before some English gentlemen, carrying her sucking child, wrapt in a red blanket.

The women among the Indians of America are what the Helots were among the Spartans, a vanquished people obliged to toil for their conquerors. Hence on the banks of the Oroonoko we have heard of mothers slaying their daughters out of compassion, and smothering them in the hour of their birth. They consider this barbarous pity as a virtue.

Father Joseph Gumilla, reproving one of them for this inhuman crime, received the following answer:--"I wish to God, Father, I wish to God, that my mother had, by my death, prevented the manifold distresses I have endured, and have yet to endure as long as I live. Had she kindly stilled me in my birth, I should not have felt the pain of death, nor the numberless other pains to which life has subjected me. Consider, Father, our deplorable condition. Our husbands go to hunt with their bows and arrows, and trouble themselves no farther: we are dragged along with one infant at our breast, and another in a basket. They return in the evening without any burden; we return with the burden of our children. Though tired with long walking, we are not allowed to sleep, but must labor the whole night, in grinding maize to make _chica_ for them. They get drunk, and in their drunkenness beat us, draw us by the hair of the head, and tread us under foot. A young wife is brought upon us and permitted to abuse us and our children. What kindness can we show to our female children, equal to that of relieving them from such servitude, more bitter a thousand times than death? I repeat again, would to God my mother had put me under ground, the moment I was born."

"The men," says Commodore Byron, in his account of the inhabitants of South America, "exercise a most despotic authority over their wives whom they consider in the same view they do any other part of their property, and dispose of them accordingly. Even their common treatment of them is cruel. For, though the toil and hazard of procuring food lies entirely on the women, yet they are not suffered to touch any part of it, until the husband is satisfied; and then he assign them their portion, which is generally very scanty, and such as he has not a stomach for himself."

The Greenlanders, who live mostly upon seals, think it sufficient to catch and bring them on shore; and would rather submit to starve than assist their women in skinning, dressing, or dragging home the cumbrous animals to their huts.

In some parts of America, when the men kill any game in the woods, they lay it at the root of a tree, fix a mark there, and travelling until they arrive at their habitation, send their women to fetch it, a task which their own laziness and pride equally forbid.

Among many of the tribes of wandering Arabs, the women are not only obliged to do every domestic and every rural work, but also to feed, to dress, and saddle the horses, for the use of their husbands.

The Moorish women, besides doing all the same kinds of drudgery, are also obliged to cultivate the fields, while their husbands stand idle spectators of the toil, or sleep inglorious beneath a neighboring shade.

In Madura the husband generally speaks to his wife in the most imperious tone; while she with fear and trembling approaches him, waits upon him while at meals, and pronounces not his name, but with the addition of every dignifying title she can devise. In return for all this submission he frequently beats and abuses her in the most barbarous manner. Being asked the reason of such a behavior, one of them answered, "As our wives are so much our inferiors why should we allow them to eat and drink with us? Why should they not serve us with whatever we call for, and afterwards sit down and eat up what we leave? If they commit faults, why should they not suffer correction? It is their business only to bring up our children, pound our rice, make our oil, and do every other kind of drudgery, purposes to which only their low and inferior natures are adapted."

The Circassian custom of breeding young girls, on purpose to be sold in the public market to the highest bidder, is generally known. Perhaps, however, upon minute examination, we shall find that women are, in some degree, bought and sold in every country, whether savage or civilized.

EASTERN WOMEN.

The women of the East, have in general, always exhibited the same appearance. Their manners, customs, and fashions, unalterable like their rocks, have stood the test of many revolving ages. Though the kingdoms of their country have often changed masters, though they have submitted to the arms of almost every invader, yet the laws by which their sex are governed and enslaved, have never been revised nor amended.

Had the manners and customs of the Asiatic women been subject to the same changes as they are in Europe, we might have expected the same changes in the sentiments and writings of their men. But, as this is not the case, we have reason to presume that the sentiments entertained by Solomon, by the apocryphal writers, and by the ancient Bramins, are the sentiments of this day.

Though the confinement of women be an unlawful exertion of superior power, yet it affords a proof that the inhabitants of the East are advanced some degrees farther in civilization than mere savages, who have hardly any love and consequently as little jealousy.

This confinement is not very rigid in the empire of the Mogul. It is, perhaps, less so in China, and in Japan hardly exists.

Though women are confined in the Turkish empire, they experience every other indulgence. They are allowed, at stated times, to go to the public baths; their apartments are richly, if not elegantly furnished; they have a train of female slaves to serve and amuse them; and their persons are adorned with every costly ornament which their fathers or husbands can afford.