CHAPTER IV.

WOMAN IN ANCIENT GREECE

IT is not necessary, and it would be much more difficult, to make a minute inquiry into the other civilisations that sprang up, before the Christian era, in that remarkable tract of Asia that lies between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Their lesser power and shorter life have left them in the shade of the greatness of Egypt and Assyria. One only of them was destined, in an indirect way, to have a momentous influence on woman's position in civilisation; but it will be convenient to notice the Jews when their ideas are embodied in Christianity and begin to mould Europe. There was a striking lack of uniformity in the various tribes that were struggling upward in that western offshoot of Asia. The Phenicians are (somewhat precariously) linked with the Egyptians, but do not seem to have granted their women anything like the same independence. The Sumerians (or oldest Babylonians) are connected with the Mongols, yet gave woman an excellent position. The Jews were Semites, like the later Babylonians, yet began an ominous tradition of contempt for woman.

Only one of these West-Asiatic civilisations is known to us with any fulness; but this also was monarchical, and neither men nor women (save the privileged few) had any political power. Ancient Persia was the fourth world-power to issue from the chaos of tribes and build on the ruins of its predecessors. If we trust the Greek writers, the position of woman in Persia varied very considerably. It is suggested that she was oppressed in the western parts, where the religion of Zoroaster had less influence, and respected in the eastern. The poorer women had the liberty that their poverty generally entails, but the women of the wealthier had enclosed chambers and guarding eunuchs. The monarchs and princes had large harems, and their women at times won the irregular and blood-stained power that the system often gives them. The Persian sacred book, the Avesta, contains the best feeling of the country. A man must have the woman's consent to marriage, must respect her after marriage, and must only in an exceptional case take a second wife; but _her_ duty is to obey, and she is treated with the usual unfairness in regard to divorce and misconduct.

The short sway of Persia, however, soon fell before invaders from Europe, who bring us to the interesting story of woman's position in Greece. Here we at once enter an atmosphere much nearer to our own than that of the older civilisations, and the tendency to see parallels and to draw morals becomes very strong. With the general statement that woman was emphatically subordinated to man in the chief centre of Greek civilisation, at Athens, and that there arose in time a contest of feminists and anti-feminists to which we may liken our familiar struggle, all are now familiar. But we must trace the evolution of woman's position with some care, if we are to understand it aright.

Letourneau (_La condition de la femme_) and Otto Henne am Rhyn (_Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte_) have collected many indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god, Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so "subordinate" when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called "matriotism," gives the best suggestion of the way in which they lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer realisation of the father's part in the children aided this. In time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively nurtures the seed. The father is the creator.

I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to it, because we do not find woman's position varying with the number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps, there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and daughter goddesses, whatever woman's position in the tribe was.

Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life, but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman was one of subordination.

A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (_La femme dans l'antiquité Grecque_, 1901), in which he essays to vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual, of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember, however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason (_Woman in the Golden Ages_, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek woman was "bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate."

That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights.

As it was, her life was by no means "cheerless." Until she approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year) an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not, as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense, nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage she was restricted to the _gynecæum_, or women's quarters. One must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too, the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that roared at the comedy or seethed round the _bema_, were not lit up by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the journey to the Olympic games.

This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day.

This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their strictures on woman's intelligence, that where, among their own kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition, and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However, the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world, and the fire dwindled and died.

The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of restriction. One of these was the rise of the class of _hetæræ_ and the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud. Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous of the _hetæræ_, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that led the Athenians to put her on trial.

It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife Hipparchia to think. Epicurus--who was not the hedonist so many imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher--opened his quiet garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this only an admission of woman's equal capacity for culture and demand for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the great writers expressly consider it.

Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women; but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband. Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle, or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.

But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of his race. He saw plainly--what we might have expected the more scientific Aristotle to see--that woman's frailer power of reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato as saying that "the female sex is inferior to the male," and represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only, and not on women, and he presently adds: "The same education which makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same."[5] There are differences between men and women, but he says that these differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so solid is his conviction of woman's capacity. In a word, one of the greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed.

What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade both men and women turn from such political life as was left in Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era), held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of woman's position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of Hypatia--not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria.

In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and, much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman's position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the spacious tomb of old empires.

Greece had run the normal course that I have traced for the earlier powers. In its pre-civilised stage its men and women seem to have stood on a common level, with the military rulers over all. As it advances from the gloom into the lit territory of history, we find that the men have asserted a crude supremacy in private as well as public life. In this Greece differed from Egypt and Assyria, and a proportionately keener struggle set in. We find many traces of that struggle from the moment when Greece reaches its height of culture; and the intense pre-occupation with moral problems, which begins with Socrates, culminates in the extraordinary feminism of Plato's _Republic_. The movement increases as culture rises. But decay has set in, from a variety of causes, and the problems of civilisation are cast on other shoulders. I do not suppose that even the most determined of anti-feminists will venture to connect the decay of Athens with the stirring of its women. The causes have been too often and too clearly traced. The cry of the Athenian feminists dies away because the frame of the superb city is palsied and beset. Another vigorous race fills the stage of the world, and we pass over to Italy for the next phase in the development of woman's position.