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FEMINISM IN GREEK LITERATURE




_Other Books by F. A. WRIGHT_


    THE GIRDLE OF APHRODITE
    THE ARTS IN GREECE
    THE LETTERS OF ALCIPHRON (_May, 1923_)
    THE LOVER’S HANDBOOK (_in preparation_)




                            FEMINISM IN GREEK
                               LITERATURE

                         FROM HOMER TO ARISTOTLE

                                   BY
                              F. A. WRIGHT

                                 LONDON
                      GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.
                      NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
                                  1923

           Printed in Great Britain by MACKAYS LTD., Chatham.




    MANIBUS

    A. W. VERRALL

    ΤΡΟΦΕΙΑ




CONTENTS


                                                   PAGE

          INTRODUCTION                                1

       I. THE EARLY EPIC                              7

      II. THE IONIANS AND HESIOD                     16

     III. THE LYRIC POETS                            28

      IV. THE MILESIAN TALES                         43

       V. ATHENS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY                57

      VI. ÆSCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES                     70

     VII. EURIPIDES                                  86

    VIII. EURIPIDES: THE FOUR FEMINIST PLAYS        113

      IX. THE SOCRATIC CIRCLE                       135

       X. ARISTOPHANES                              150

      XI. PLATO                                     168

     XII. THE ATTIC ORATORS                         183

    XIII. ARISTOTLE                                 202




INTRODUCTION


There is a question sometimes put to scholars, a doubt often latent in
scholars’ minds—How was it that Greek civilisation, with all its high
ideals and achievements, fell so easily before what seems at first
sight an altogether inferior culture? The difficulty is not solved by
a reference to military resources or administrative skill, for moral
strength is the only thing that matters in history, and a nation has
never yet succeeded merely by pure intellect or by brute force. The fact
is—and it is as well to state it plainly—that the Greek world perished
from one main cause, a low ideal of womanhood and a degradation of
women which found expression both in literature and in social life. The
position of women and the position of slaves—for the two classes went
together—were the canker-spots which, left unhealed, brought about the
decay first of Athens and then of Greece.

For many centuries in Ionia and Athens there was an almost open state of
sex-war. At Miletus a woman never sat at table with her husband, for he
was the enemy with whom bread must not be broken; at Athens, while all
the men went free, women were kept as slaves, and a stranger in the harem
might be killed at sight. The sexes were sharply separated: men and women
had but few opportunities for mutual esteem and affection, and domestic
life—the life of the home, the wife and the children—was poisoned at its
source.

The causes and results of this war, far worse than any faction or civil
strife, are lamentable enough: its manifestations in ancient literature
are perhaps even more important, for it is hard to say how far current
opinions of feminine disabilities are not unconsciously due to the
long line of writers, Greek and Latin, from Simonides of Amorgos, in
the seventh century before Christ, to Juvenal in the second century of
our era, who used all their powers of rhetoric and literary skill to
disparage and depreciate womankind. In the whole deplorable business men
were in the wrong, and they therefore took the aggressive. They applied
to women the comforting doctrine of Aristotle, that some people were
slaves because they were made by nature to be slaves: women were men’s
moral inferiors, and therefore it was men’s duty to keep them down.

At Sparta certainly, and perhaps in North Greece, women occupied a very
different place. Spartan women were regarded as free human beings, and
the relations between the sexes were inestimably better than at Athens.
But Sparta, Thessaly, Macedonia, have no direct representation in Greek
literature; we get their point of view only in the writings of some
Athenians, such as Plato and Xenophon, who rebelled against the current
institutions of their state, and in the Alexandrian poets, Apollonius
and Theocritus, who, even in the midst of the luxurious city, kept some
of the freshness of their native hills. Most of the great writers came
from Ionia or from Athens: the Ionians are nearly all misogynists,
and have succeeded in colouring many parts of the Homeric poems with
their perverse immorality: the typical Athenian, and those foreigners
who found their ideal in Athens—Herodotus, Sophocles, Thucydides, the
Orators—usually treat women as a negligible quantity.

Æschylus was an original thinker, and in this, as in many ways, took a
different view from most of his countrymen. But it is not until we come
to Euripides that we get the woman’s side of the case definitely stated.
Euripides ventured to doubt man’s infallibility: he put the doctrine of
the nobility of man, as he put the other doctrines of the nobility of
race and the nobility of war, to the touchstone of a really critical
intelligence, and he came to a conclusion very different from that which
is expressed by the great majority of his predecessors.

Upon his own generation Euripides had a profound effect. Socrates,
Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon are all feminists in varying degrees,
and a fairly full statement of feminist doctrine may be found in their
works. But the idealist did not win the day. It is true that women were
never so degraded—in European civilisation at least—after Euripides’ time
as they had been before; but his teaching did not bear its full fruit.
Aristotle—the supreme type of the practical mind—threw all the weight
of his unexampled influence into the other scale, and the Aristotelian
view of the natural inferiority of women prevailed: so that the poets of
Ionia, libertines and profligates as most of them were, find their work
completed by the philosopher of Stagirus.

Greek is the source from which most Roman writers drew their inspiration,
and although the position of the Roman matron, honoured as the mother of
the household, was infinitely higher than that of the too-often childless
Athenian wife, there is still an undercurrent of misogyny which permeates
Latin literature, and finds its fullest expression in Juvenal. All the
venom of earlier writers is collected by the satirist, who adds the
bitterness of his own bile, seasoned with the highly-coloured rhetoric
which the Romans loved, and finally, with infinite zest, disgorges the
mixture in the six hundred lines of the Sixth Satire. But, even as
Aristotle sums up the final tendencies of Greek literature, so Juvenal
represents almost the last effort of the anti-feminist school at Rome.
The Christianity of the East and the romance of the North were already
beginning to modify the grosser realism of the Mediterranean world, and
towards the end of the second century the reaction came, when the Greek
genius gave to the world the last, and perhaps the most fruitful, of all
its gifts in literature—the romantic novel. Longus, in the _Daphnis and
Chloe_, strikes a new note, and his hero is, perhaps, the first gentleman
in matters of the affections that we find in ancient literature. The
barbarian invasions soon came to devastate the land, but Longus had
sown the seed, and he is the true father of all the love romances of
mediæval chivalry. As Nausicaa is the first, so Chloe is almost the last
of ancient heroines; and Greek literature, by a curious turn of fate,
ironical enough considering its general tendency, ends as it begins, with
the praise of the perfect maiden.




I.—THE EARLY EPIC


Any discussion of Greek literature must begin with Homer, although as
regards women and the social position the Epic in its first form stands
somewhat aloof from the general current of ancient thought. The Homeric
poems are in a very real sense the Greek Bible, for they represent a
standard of morality which in many respects is far higher than that which
prevailed at Athens in the great era of Greek history, and they picture
a state of society very different from the complex civilisation of the
city-state.

It must be remembered that the Homeric poems were not written to suit the
taste of the old Mediterranean people, who, if we may trust the evidence
of archæology and certain signs in their language, had but a low code of
sexual morality, and were inclined to regard women as mere instruments of
pleasure. The Epic, in its original shape, was composed for the Achæan
chiefs who came down into Greece from Central Europe, and in sexual
matters were rather of the Scandinavian type. But the Achæans were
only a small ruling class, and were soon assimilated by the conquered
peoples, whose language they adopted. A second tide of invasion by the
northern tribes called Dorian led to somewhat more permanent results,
but the original Mediterranean race was always far superior in numbers,
and unless inter-marriage was prohibited by law it was only a matter
of time for the primary racial type to reappear. Hence the interest of
Greek history, which is one long process of inter-blending and change:
the renascence of the conquered and the gradual disappearance of the
conquerors. Hence also the difference of view in all feminist matters
between Homer and much of the later Greek literature.

The Odyssey especially, which, though perhaps later in composition
than the original Iliad, has been less worked over and received fewer
additions, is based on an entirely different idea of woman’s position
from that which was held after the seventh century B.C. Samuel Butler’s
theory that the Odyssey was composed by a woman, perhaps Nausicaa
herself, is hardly capable of exact proof, but at any rate women in the
Odyssey are never degraded as they are in many of the later passages of
the Iliad, and the one lewd passage, the first lay of Demodocus (in Book
8), ‘the loves of Ares and Aphrodite,’ is a plain interpolation, and a
clumsy one at that. Women indeed pull the strings in the Odyssey: the
goddess Athena, the nymphs, Calypso and Circe, and the mortals, Penelope
and Nausicaa, are the principal actors in the drama. With both these
latter there are traces of the old German custom of Mutterrecht: the
kingship of the tribe seems to go on the woman’s side. The claimants
to Odysseus’ chieftainship seek it through his wife; Nausicaa is the
only daughter, and her marriage is of importance to all the tribe. So
Calypso and Circe are represented as island-queens, living in independent
sovereignty, and normally unconcerned with male companionship. Odysseus
is to both very much in the position of a prince consort, and, being an
active man, suffers severely from lack of occupation and lack of power.
Athena is the guiding spirit of the whole action, and takes a motherly
interest in the hero, but otherwise she is pure intelligence superior to
man and quite free from any desire for man’s society.

The women of the Odyssey follow her lead, and have little trace of
that over-sexuality which is ascribed by later writers to all women as
a natural trait. It cannot be said that the wise Penelope shows any
womanish weakness in her constant love: she bears her husband’s absence
with resignation, and maintains his authority intact during a period of
twenty years. On his return she is by no means over-anxious to recognise
him. When the nurse tells her of the slaughter of the suitors by
Odysseus she calls her a fool, and threatens her with punishment for
disturbing a busy woman with idle tales. Telemachus chides her for her
wilful stubbornness: Odysseus dresses himself in royal raiment, but
fails to make any impression, and finally, in disgust, calls to the
nurse to make him up a bed so that he may go off and sleep by himself,
for, says he, this woman has a heart of iron in her breast. When at last
she is convinced, she explains that her hesitation has been due to a
well-founded distrust of men and their wiles, and she is content to let
her husband go off the very next morning to visit the old Laertes.

Again, Nausicaa has no traces of the timid shyness which is counted a
virtue among harem women. She faces the half-naked Odysseus boldly, as he
comes from the bush where he has been hiding ‘like a lion of the hills,
rained upon and buffeted by the wind, and his eyes are ablaze,’ and in
all her dealings with him she is a charming mixture of generosity and
caution.

Moreover, the morality of the Odyssey in all sexual matters is very high,
and, if it is not offensive to say so, it is women’s morality. There is
very little appeal to the sensual man, and although Calypso and Circe
were by later writers taken as types of the voluptuous female, their
fascination in the Odyssey is left entirely to the imagination, and they
are pictured as industrious housewives. The description is the same for
both—‘singing in a sweet voice within doors as she walked to and fro
before the loom.’ Little or nothing is said of any physical attraction
they may have possessed.

So with the punishment meted out at the end of the story to the
maid-servants who had accepted the embraces of the suitors. First,
they carry out the corpses of their dead lovers, then they wash and
cleanse the bloody floor, and finally they are hanged—twelve of them
together—‘like thrushes or doves caught in a snare; and they struggled
with their feet for a little while, but not for long.’ It is one of the
few ruthless passages in the poem: there is no tendency here to err
on the side of indulgence to the sins of the flesh, and for such sins
harsher measure is dealt out to the woman than to the man.

But as significant as anything of the gulf between the Odyssey and later
Greek literature is the treatment of the two famous sisters, Helen and
Clytemnestra.

Helen, to the later Greeks the type of the wanton, appears in the Odyssey
as the faithful wife, respected and self-respecting, of King Menelaus.
She lives in his palace, busy with domestic duties, and when she thinks
of the past it is to rejoice over her return home and escape from Troy,
‘where,’ she says, ‘I used to mourn over the cruel fate which Aphrodite
sent upon me, when she led me from my beloved country, leaving behind
me my daughter, my home, and my husband dear, who lacked nothing of
perfection in mind or in body.’ It is a very different picture from
that of Paris’ mistress, as we have her in later stories, flying with a
foreign youth from her lawful lord, and betraying her too fond master.

So Clytemnestra—after the lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries
had worked up her story—is that most dreadful figure to King Man, the
regicide, the woman who dares, by craft and guile, to kill the man set
over her as ruler. In all the later stories it is Clytemnestra who
arranges the details of Agamemnon’s death—the bath, the enveloping
robe, and the axe; it is she who deals the fatal blow, while her lover,
Ægisthus, is a cowardly nonentity, entirely under the dominion of the
woman.

But in the Odyssey the story is very different. It is told twice—by
Agamemnon to Odysseus in Hades, and by Nestor to Telemachus at Pylos, and
this last version is significant enough to be given word for word:

    We Greeks (says Nestor) were lingering over there at Troy, and
    many a task did we fulfil. But he—Ægisthus—at his ease in the
    quiet valleys of Argos, where the horses feed, tried to beguile
    the wife of Agamemnon with soft words. At first, of course,
    fair Clytemnestra refused to do the shameful thing, for she
    was a woman of honest heart. Moreover, there was with her a
    minstrel, whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy, had bidden to
    protect his wife. But soon the fate of heaven encompassed the
    minstrel, and brought him to his death, for Ægisthus took him
    to a desert island and left him there, a prey for the birds to
    tear asunder. As for the queen—he willing and she willing—he
    led her to his house. And many a sacrifice did he offer to the
    gods when he had done that great deed, which never in his heart
    had he expected to accomplish.

Such is the passage, and the last two sentences are a literal translation
of the lines which appear thus in Pope’s version:

    Then virtue was no more: her guard away,
    She fell, to lust a voluntary prey.
    Even to the temple stalked the adulterous spouse
    With impious thanks and mockery of vows.

For these are the dangers of poetical translation.

But more important than any single character or episode is the general
impression given by the whole poem, and it may fairly be said that the
entire framework of the Odyssey presupposes a condition of society in
which women are regarded as not in the least, _quâ_ women, inferior to
men.

In the Iliad things are different, and the poem, as we have it now, gives
us three distinct pictures of women’s position in life. The original
epic, the ‘Wrath of Achilles’ has hardly any place for women at all.
It is true that Achilles’ anger has for its cause the woman Briseis;
but Achilles is angry, not at the loss of a woman whom he loves, but at
the loss of a piece of property which he knows by experience to be of
considerable value and service. Briseis is a slave—a thing, not a person.
In the whole Iliad she is only mentioned ten times, and nine times out
of those ten she is merely catalogued as an article of value, with the
slave-dealer’s epithet, ‘fair-cheeked,’ attached.

But this is hardly surprising. All the earlier portions of the Iliad are
primarily lays of battle. They are anti-social, and woman has no part or
lot in them.

The Iliad however, is built up of many different strata, and one
stratum—by no means the least important—was contributed by a poet who
understood and sympathised with women. In thought and language he has
many affinities with the author of the Odyssey, and he is probably
responsible for the one passage in the poem where Briseis appears as a
human being, and makes lament over the dead body of Patroclus: a speech
which served Ovid as the groundwork wherefrom—with many embellishments—he
expands the letter in ‘the Heroines.’ From the same hand as Briseis’
speech comes the supreme scene of the parting between Hector and
Andromache, and all the closing passages of the Iliad: the ransoming
of Hector, and the lamentation of the women—his wife, his mother, and
Helen—over the corpse.

No one can read the Iliad without feeling that the moral spirit of all
these passages is of a very different and of a very much higher quality
than the brutality of the earliest lays, and the loose cynicism of the
last additions to the poem, which we shall have next to consider.




II.—THE IONIANS AND HESIOD


Between the Homeric poems in their first shape and the next stage of
Greek literature there is a gap of centuries, and when the curtain goes
up again on Greek history at the end of the eighth century, the centre of
civilisation is in Asia Minor, the coast towns and their adjacent islands.

The period of fighting, invasions, and tribal migrations is over: there
has been a revival of the old Minoan culture, the Greeks have become
a nation of traders living in luxurious cities, such as Miletus and
Mytilene. Politically they are dependent on the great Eastern land
empires, and from the East they have taken ideas which vitally affect the
position of women.

The first of these may be stated thus: a woman, even a free-born woman,
is the property of the man who is her husband. The second, which follows
from this, is that, love between man and his property being absurd,
romantic affection is only conceivable between men; between man and
woman it is impossible. Of these two ideas, the first, which involved
the seclusion of women and the harem system, was only partially applied
in ancient Greece. It flourished in Ionia and at Athens during the
great period of her history, but it never took root in Sparta, or in
the chief cities of Hellenistic civilisation. Its corollary, however,
spread fatally from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to Italy. It lasted
for many centuries, and tended to destroy all romantic love between the
two sexes, and very often all the ordinary comfortable affection which
may exist without romance between husband and wife. The sexes drew
apart: the man, immersed in war and politics and absent from his home
most of his life, had little experience of woman as a thinking animal,
and unfamiliarity bred contempt. As happened again later in the world’s
history under the very different conditions of monastic life, the natural
social intercourse between men and women was artificially hampered, and
the inevitable crop of errors and perversions followed. But the monks,
in their dislike of women, were at least ostensibly inspired by a strict
code of sexual morality: a good deal of Ionian literature has for one of
its objects a desire to defend the perverted sexual instinct which was
the curse of ancient life. Of this sort are the stories of Ganymede, the
young Asiatic, taken up to heaven by the ruler of the sky and displacing
the maiden Hebe, and of Hylas, the minion of Heracles, whose beauty
brought him to his death.

Narcissus and Hyacinthus are persons of the same type, while the heroes
of this kind of literature, Jason, Heracles, and Theseus, reserve all
their finer chivalrous feelings for men, and regard women as a kind of
booty, to be won, if possible, by fraud; if fraud is ineffective, by the
judicious use of force. Jason deserts Medea in favour of a younger and
richer woman. Heracles leaves his wife, to roam abroad, capturing by
force any woman that pleases him. Theseus spends his life in betraying
women, and in his old age marries Phædra, the young sister of Ariadne.
But their exploits do not at all detract from the heroic character of the
three worthies, for it is now recognised that women are vile creatures
who deserve vile treatment, and so we have a second class of tale
invented to illustrate the innate viciousness of the female sex. There is
the story of Pasiphaë and the Minotaur, Myrrha and Adonis, Leda and the
swan, Europa and the bull—and so on, and so on.

The same frame of mind that invented these tales ascribed to Sappho all
kinds of unnatural vice, degraded Helen into a wanton, and Penelope
into a shrew, and made it seem only logical that women, being the
creatures they were, should be kept prisoners in a harem and confined to
child-bearing—that indispensable function being, indeed, the main reason
for their being allowed to exist at all.

The tales of Pasiphaë, Leda, and Europa, however, though useful enough
in their way, are a little crude, and we have a more artistic method
employed in the passages which about this time were incorporated into the
Iliad by Ionian poets, with the idea of degrading the whole conception
of the two divinities who represent womanly love, Hera and Aphrodite.
Hera, the goddess of married life, the wife in her divine aspect, is
represented by these decadents as an interfering termagant, spying upon
her husband and seeking always to thwart him in the enjoyment of his
legitimate lusts and caprices; Aphrodite, the goddess of unrestrained
physical passion, becomes a calculating courtesan.

The method pursued is that same kind of false realism which has supplied
our comic stage with the well-worn themes of the old maid and the
mother-in-law, and it need hardly be said that it harmonises very badly
with the romantic splendour of the epic lays. The heroic hexameter gives
for our ears an air of nobility even to this stuff, but in its essence it
is colloquial style of a rather tawdry sort, and one or two passages will
illustrate its character; for example, the last hundred lines of Book 1
of the Iliad, an episode altogether out of harmony with the rest of the
book. Thetis has come to ask Zeus to avenge her son: Hera knows of her
visit, and this is the language she uses to her husband:

    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.

All this is pure misogyny; but it is interesting to notice the especial
faults which our poet imputes to womankind. They are chiefly the two
vices which a surly master will always find in his servants, gluttony and
idleness; they work too little and eat too much. We are far removed in
this world from our ‘Feed the brute,’ and it must be remembered that in a
Greek household the work was hard, monotonous, and continual. There were
no labour-saving appliances, for the hard work was chiefly done by women.
Every mouthful of bread or porridge eaten in a Greek home had come into
the house as a sack of dirty grain. First it was winnowed, and cleaned by
hand; then the grain was put into a small hand-mill, and by a laborious
process of pestle and mortar it was ground into flour; the flour was then
made into dough, kneaded and baked; every process being attended with the
maximum of manual labour and general inconvenience, borne by the women of
the house, while the master strolled about the city.

So also with the clothes and household fabrics: every operation in their
manufacture was done at home by the women. The master contented himself
with buying the sheep-skins—and, as Theocritus lets us see, often did
that very badly—which he then handed to his wife. First, the skins had
to be washed and dried; then the wool was cut off and carded; then by a
laborious process of spinning the wool was turned into yarn, and finally
on a hand-loom the yarn was woven into cloth: the same piece of stuff, so
excellent was the workmanship, often serving for coat, blanket and shroud.

It is obvious, then, that an idle wife—if such a thing existed—or a wife
who ate more than her share of the laboriously prepared bread, would be
a great grief to her lord and master, who was himself too busy with the
higher work of politics to attend to such things, and that the machinery
of the household would be put very much out of gear. It may well be that
Simonides was unfortunate in his choice of a helpmate, for as Hipponax,
the third of this company, mournfully complains, ‘_It is hard to get a
wife who will both bring you a good dowry and then do all the work_.’
Hipponax, if we may judge him by some forty short fragments, was a
thoroughly disagreeable person; he is always asking and being refused; he
varies complaints with abuse or downright threats.

‘_Hold my coat_,’ he cries, ‘_and I will knock out his eye. I’ve got two
right hands, and I never miss when I throw_.’ On the subject of women he
does not say so much as the other two, for the range of his thought is
almost confined to carnal delights. A fair sample of his style is this
fragment: ‘_There are only two days in your life that your wife gives you
pleasure: the day you marry her and the day you bury her_.’

This insistence on the physical side of love runs through all the elegiac
and lyric poetry of the age. Love to Mimnermus is a thing of secret
kisses, of chambering and wantonness, and it depends alone on physical
attractions. A young man is happy, for he is handsome and desirable; an
old man is wretched, to women an object of scorn. The satiety that comes
from excess of sensual pleasure is the main cause of the melancholy
pessimism that broods over much of Ionian literature. Of Alcæus and his
Lycus, Anacreon and his Bathyllus, Theognis and Cyrnus, it is unnecessary
now to speak, but it is difficult to believe such amiable apologists
as Mr. Benecke when they try to show that a fine idealism was the
inspiration of these relationships. Neither the character of the men’s
writings nor that of their time and country give much ground for such
confidence, and if we seek the purity of love’s passion we must turn to
Sappho.

Among all the foulness of her time Sappho shines out like a star. No loss
in literature is so lamentable as the loss of the nine books of her poems
that the Alexandrian library possessed; no treasure in literature is
quite so precious as the fragments that various chances have preserved
for us. And, luckily, the number of those fragments is still increasing,
as will be seen by a comparison of the two best studies of Sappho in
recent years, the exquisite collection of translations issued by Mr.
Wharton in 1886, and the brilliant monograph on the new fragments by Mr.
J. M. Edmonds in 1912. Even since that date fresh poems have come to
light, and we do not know what Egypt may have yet in store.

In all the fragments, new or old, there is an indefinable quality of
personal feeling. Sappho, it has been said, has left us only a fragment
of her work, but it is a fragment of her soul. Her friend and rival,
Alcæus, is a great poet, but he lacks the fiery intensity of her
inspiration, which gives life even to the briefest phrase that some
grammarian has quoted for a rare word. Take the lines that Rossetti
adapted:

    Like the sweet apple which reddens upon topmost bough,
    A-top on the topmost twig—which the pluckers forget somehow,
    Forget it not—nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
    Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found,
    Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
    Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.

Or, again, this other:

    Dead, dead.—In death,
    Below the ground, bereft of breath,
    Silent, alone, the close-shut tomb enfoldeth thee.
    To my songs thou wouldst not hearken, and songless shalt thou be;
    Thou wouldst not love me here on earth,
    In death thou shalt loveless be.

Mr. Edmonds, in his translations, has kept much of the simple charm of
the Greek:

    I have a little daughter rare,
    That’s like the golden flowers fair,
    My Cleis.
    I would not take all Lydia wide,
    No, nor lovely Greece beside,
    For Cleis.

And this, a portion of a new fragment:

    And often as her way she wanders,
    And on gentle Attis ponders,
    With sad longing love opprest,
    Her heart devours her tender breast
      Till she cries, in pain,
    ‘Oh, come to me,’ for you and I
    Know the burden of her cry,
    Since Night, which hath the myriad ears,
    Sends her word of what she hears
      Across the severing main.

This tender simplicity is the soul of Sappho, and in her verse even a few
words will suggest a picture:

    Come to me, O Love:
    O Love, the inheritor, enter in.
    Everywhere is swept and garnished,
    Everything is prepared.
    The fire of my heart burns brightly,
    All my body is food for thee,
    And on my bosom thou shalt sleep the long night through.

ἐπὶ δὲ στήθεος ἐννυχεύσεις. Surely no one save Sappho has touched so
closely the heart of love and poetry.




IV.—THE MILESIAN TALES


The chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness,
a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political
organisation. The Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom—for
himself; but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which
alone makes freedom possible. Both in sexual matters and in politics,
his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at
cross-purposes. He wished to be independent of women; but he was not
meant by nature to be a monk, and he purchased his apparent freedom by
yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women’s love. He
wished to be independent of Persia; but he was not a born soldier, and
he finally bought a pretence of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a
Persian satrap, forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace.

The Ionians were, indeed, a strange medley of qualities, and with them
intellectual activity stood in sharp contrast with moral and physical
sloth. They were essentially a race of city dwellers; for them the
charm of the country and of nature had little attraction, and their
civilisation found its most perfect expression during the seventh and
sixth centuries in the splendid luxury of such towns as the Ionian
Miletus, in Asia Minor, and the Achæan Sybaris, in South Italy. The two
cities were closely connected by ties of trade and social intercourse,
and in both places material prosperity led quickly to moral corruption,
and voluptuousness became the rule of life. Like Buenos Ayres to-day,
Miletus and Sybaris were trading ports founded in a new country, and the
rapid growth of riches discouraged the manlier virtues. The mixture of
races was a danger, the climate favoured voluptuous pleasures, and the
bracing stimulus of war was, until too late, absent. The moral and sexual
degradation that resulted from this unbridled pursuit of pleasure found
its expression, as we have seen, in literature. The tale of Ganymede, the
episode of the tricked husband in the _Iliad_, and the catalogue of women
in Simonides, are fair samples of Ionian thought. No one of the three has
any moral value; indeed, a strict Puritan would probably refuse to let
them soil his lips; but they are at least decent enough to be written
down in a literary form, and to pass muster, if they are not too closely
examined.

There was, however, another and even less creditable class of story of
which literary historians tell us little, but which, probably, was first
invented in such towns as Miletus and Sybaris in the seventh and sixth
centuries, during the time of their greatest prosperity—the so-called
Milesian Tales. Usually circulating by word of mouth, they endured for
centuries, and occasionally make a furtive appearance in history, but
their significance in sexual morality has not always been appreciated.
In dealing with them as literature we are confronted with a threefold
difficulty: firstly, many of the most typical specimens of this style
were never written down at all; secondly, most of the stories that found
a footing in literature were blotted out by the righteous indignation of
Christian moralists; thirdly, in the case of the few that do survive, it
is neither possible nor desirable to introduce them to a modern audience.
But, though they are the least estimable part of our inheritance from
ancient literature, their influence on ancient morals was very great, and
their tendency was so definitely to ruin any reasonable conception of sex
relationships that they force themselves into notice.

Though sometimes written in prose, their natural medium was the iambic
measure, invented by Archilochus, and they were meant both for a male and
female audience. Iambus the jester, _Pierrot_, has his female counterpart
in Iambë, _Pierrette_, who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and by
her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once more. This is, perhaps,
the one justification of the tales; in their more innocent form they
were intended to purge away that feeling of melancholy of which, as the
precursor of madness, the Greeks were so much afraid, by exciting the
emotion of laughter; just as tragedy effects the same purpose by exciting
the emotions of pity and fear. But this sort of humour in Athens and
Ionia soon degenerated into coarseness, and Iambë, her name now changed
to Baubo, as we see her in the ritual statuette, a woman sitting on a
pig, played a prominent and a shameful part in the Eleusinian mysteries
of Demeter. The worship of the sorrowing mother—Mater Dolorosa—was
made the cloak for nameless obscenities, and the influence of religion
was added to that of literature to degrade men’s conception of women.
These were the sort of verses and images to which Aristotle alludes in
the Seventh Book of the _Politics_; and this is one of the reasons for
Plato’s objection to poetry; better no literature at all, he thinks, than
literature degraded to these ends.

The worst type of Milesian or Sybaritic tale was definitely meant to
stimulate the animal passions, and owed little to any qualities of humour
or imagination. The sense of artistic fitness which the Athenians always
possessed kept this kind of stories out of written literature during the
great period, and confined them to the gossip of the perfumers’ and
barbers’ shops. But as soon as the decadence began, these ‘Ionian poems,’
as Athenæus calls them, became a recognised branch of letters, and we
hear of their chief practitioners, writers of ‘facetiæ,’ the ‘Hilarodoi,’
the ‘Simodoi,’ and the ‘Lysiodoi.’

Among the more notorious authors were Simus the Magnesian, Alexander the
Ætolian, Pyres the Milesian, and Sotades of Maronea, who gives his name
to that whole class of licentious writings which is represented in modern
times by the sotadic satire of Nicholas Chorier. Sotades, however, did
not confine himself to the comparatively safe pastime of libelling women.
He ventured to write lampoons upon Ptolemy Philadelphus and his sister
Arsinoe, was caught on the island where he had taken refuge, put into a
jar with a leaden top, and drowned.

But the most famous, or infamous, of all the class is Aristides, usually
called, but on very little evidence, ‘of Miletus,’ who lived perhaps
in the second century before Christ. Of the man and his book we have
little direct knowledge, but he was translated into Latin by Sisenna,
the companion of Sulla in his voluptuous debauchery, and copies of this
version were found by the Parthians in the tents of the Roman officers
after the battle of Carrhæ. Even the Parthians, as Plutarch tells us,
were disgusted by Aristides, and Ovid tries to use him as a shelter for
himself against the charge of immoral writing. The Roman poet who, though
a libertine, was at least free from some of the grosser vices of his age,
complains bitterly in his exile of the difference in treatment meted
out to Aristides and himself. ‘_Aristides was not banished_,’ he cries,
‘_and yet he fathered all the scandalous stories of Miletus: the authors
amongst us who now put together Sybaritic stories go unpunished_.’

Sybaritic and Milesian were the descriptive adjectives used even in
Ovid’s time for this kind of writing, and we can trace its popularity and
influence in Rome. Quotations are obviously impossible, and indeed the
_genre_ does not depend on literary grace. One author alone, Petronius,
possesses sufficient skill to make it tolerable, and the viler portions
of the ‘Satyricon’ are the most real examples of the literature that was
inspired by Miletus, and by Milesian ideas of womankind. The natural
coarseness of the Roman mind gave this sort of story a greater prominence
than the Greeks ever allowed, but it will probably be correct to trace
its first origin to the coast of Ionia in the seventh century and
especially to the metropolis of the Ionian States.

From the beginning at Miletus the relations between men and women were
notoriously bad, and, as Herodotus tells us, they had some historical
justification. ‘The first settlers at Miletus,’ he says, ‘having no
wives of their own, killed the men and seized the women of the country.’
On account of this massacre, the women established the law and imposed
upon themselves an oath, which they handed down to their daughters, to
this effect:

    They should never eat at the same table with their husbands,
    nor should any woman ever call her husband by his name. For
    they had killed their fathers, their husbands, and their sons,
    and after so doing had forced them to become their wives.

This is the first incident in the history of Miletus, an episode not
unlike the story of the Lemnian women, and it explains a great deal.
In the chief city of Ionia, enmity, not love, was the law between
husband and wife. Domestic life was poisoned, and literature caught
the infection. By action and reaction the mischief spread, and it is
impossible for us now fully to estimate its extent. But we cannot doubt
the effect that Ionian literature had in lowering men’s estimate of
women, and thereby degrading all their ideals of social life. The three
great curses of Greek civilisation—sexual perversion, infanticide, and
the harem system—all come into prominence during the sixth century, and
there is good reason to believe that it was just at this time that the
natural increase of population was checked, and the slow process of race
suicide begun. If Ionia was the cradle of Greek culture, as we know it,
from Ionia also came the germs of that moral disease which made a fatal
counterpoise to the intellectual supremacy of Greece.

In the worse type of Milesian Tale immorality takes its most revolting
form; but there was another and more pleasing form of story, also
invented in Ionia about this time, which occasionally is called by the
same title, and is best known to us in the collection of Æsop’s Fables.
Æsop himself, the lame slave who was made by tradition the fellow-servant
of the fair courtesan, Rhodopis, and so a contemporary of Sappho,
is hardly more a real person than Homer, and his name was used as a
convenient shelter for two slightly different kinds of humorous story.
There were the well-known animal fables which are common to the whole
Mediterranean and Asiatic world, and in Æsop find a Greek dress, and
beside them a sort of humorous anecdote, sometimes trivial, sometimes
coarse, but always strongly realistic.

They were especially popular at Athens. ‘Tell them a funny tale of
Æsop, or of Sybaris,’ says the old gentleman in Aristophanes’ ‘Wasps,’
‘something you heard at the club’; and later on in the play, when
Bdelycleon is intoxicated, we get two specimens of the style. Like our
Limericks, they are in verse, with a catch refrain: ‘_A woman at Sybaris
once_,’ and ‘_Æsop one day_,’ and although they are not particularly
humorous, it must be remembered that they are the witticisms of a drunken
man. The first runs thus:

    Æsop one night was going back from dinner, when a bitch began
    to bark at him, a bold, drunken creature. Thereupon said he:
    ‘Dear, dear! my good bitch, if you were to sell that foul
    tongue of yours and buy some flour, you would be more sensible.’

The other is this:

    A woman of Sybaris once broke a jug. The jug got a friend to
    act as witness, and laid a claim for damages. Thereupon the
    lady said: ‘By the virgin, if you would but let the lawyers
    alone and buy some sticking-plaster you would show more wisdom.’

The fables of Æsop are now a nursery classic, for, like the _Arabian
Nights_ and _Gulliver’s Travels_, they have been turned by the kindly
irony of time to a use which their authors hardly contemplated. But in
their Milesian shape there was always an underlying vein of satire, even
in the animal stories. The male animals, the eagle and the lion, are
brave and generous; the females, the fox and the weasel, are cunning and
treacherous.

Moreover, as we see in the Greek version of Babrius and the Latin
of Phædrus, separated though they be from the original by a gap of
centuries, there was a great deal of matter in the Æsopian stories which
was plainly misogynistic.

As examples, we may take from Babrius, Fable 10:

    A man fell in love with an ugly, dirty slave-girl, his own
    property, and readily gave her all she asked. She had her fill
    of gold: fine purple robes trailing at her ankles, and soon
    she began to rival the mistress of the house. ‘The goddess of
    love,’ thought she, ‘is the cause of all this’ and she honoured
    her with votive tapers, going every day to sacrifice and prayer
    with supplications and requests. But at last the goddess
    came in a dream while they were asleep, and appearing to the
    slave-girl, she said, ‘Do not thank me, or suppose that I have
    made you beautiful: I am angry with that fellow there, and so
    he thinks you fair.’

Belief in women’s beauty, we see, is mere infatuation, and so is belief
in their truth, as No. 16 shows:

    A country nurse once threatened a whining child: ‘Stop, or I
    will throw you to the wolf.’ The wolf heard the words, and
    supposing that the old dame was speaking the truth, waited
    patiently for the meal which he thought would soon be ready.
    It was not till evening that the child fell asleep, and the
    wolf, who had been waiting on slow hope, went off home very
    hungry, his mouth really agape. ‘How is it you have come home
    empty-handed?’ said his wife, who had been keeping house. ‘It’s
    very unusual.’ But the wolf replied: ‘What would you have? I
    have trusted a woman.’

No. 32 is a curious reminiscence of Simonides:

    Once upon a time a cat fell in love with a comely man, and
    glorious Cypris, the mother of Desire, allowed her to change
    her shape and take a woman’s body, one so fair that all men
    desired her. The young man saw her, fell captive in his turn
    and arranged to wed. The marriage feast was just prepared when
    a mouse ran by, and the bride, jumping down from the high
    couch, rushed after it. So the banquet came to an end, and
    Love, who had had a merry jest, departed too—for even he could
    not fight against nature.

No. 22 is more outspoken:

    Once upon a time a middle-aged man—not young, but not yet old,
    his hair a mixture of black and white—feeling that he still had
    leisure for love and merriment, took two mistresses, one young,
    one old. Now the young woman wanted to see in her lover a young
    man, the old dame desired some one as old as herself. So,
    every time, the girl plucked out any hairs that she could find
    turning white, while the old lady did the same to the black
    hairs, until young and old together at last pulled out all the
    hair he had and left him bald. _Moral_: Pitiable is the man who
    falls into the hands of women: they bite and bite until they
    strip him to the bone.

So in the fable of the lion who falls in love with a maiden, the noble
animal strips himself of claws and teeth, and everything that makes him
formidable, to please the girl, and for his reward is beaten to death.

In all these stories there is a note of satirical depreciation, but the
best example of the cynical humour which inspires the whole class is
to be found in the tale of the Ephesian Widow. Phædrus gives a brief
version; in Petronius the story is put into the mouth of the satyr-poet
Eumolpus, and in a condensed form it will perhaps bear quotation.
‘There was once a matron of Ephesus so notoriously virtuous that all
the women of the neighbouring towns used to come and gaze upon her as
at a wonderful spectacle.’ So it begins, and the first sentence, which
might come from Voltaire’s _Candide_, gives the spirit in which it is
written. The lady’s husband died, and not satisfied with the ordinary
signs of grief, the bereaved wife insisted on following the corpse to
the underground chamber where it was laid. There the lady ‘with singular
and exemplary constancy,’ remained with it for five days, deaf to the
entreaties of relatives and magistrates, refusing all food, and attended
only by one servant-girl whose business it was to share her mistress’
grief and renew the taper which alone lit up the sepulchral chamber.

‘The whole country was full of the story,’ so the tale runs, ‘and men of
every class agreed that this was a real and brilliant example of virtue
and affection in a woman—_the only one they had ever known_.’

In the meantime, however, some robbers had been crucified near the place,
and a soldier on guard over the crosses noticed the light of the taper
gleaming in the darkness. Yielding to the weakness of human nature,
he made his way down to the vault, and was surprised to find a pretty
woman, where he had expected to see a ghost. But he soon realised the
situation—that the lady could not get over the loss of her man—and so
he brought his traps down to the cellar and began to address some words
of comfort to her. ‘Do not persist in useless grief,’ said he, ‘do not
rend your breast with unavailing sobs; all of us will come to this; we
all have but one final resting-place.’ His attempt at consolation—which,
though well-meant, is certainly somewhat commonplace—only irritated the
lady, and he turned his attention to the servant (for in this sort of
stories there is always a soubrette) and induced her to partake of his
rations.

The girl was then able to persuade her mistress to follow her example,
and soon all three were eating and drinking together.

‘You know,’ so says Eumolpus, ‘the result of a good meal: the soldier was
soon as successful in overcoming the matron’s resolute virtue as he had
been in overcoming her resolute desire for death.’

The doors of the vault were closed, so that it might appear that the good
lady had breathed her last over her husband’s body; the soldier brought
down all sorts of comestibles, and two or three days and nights were
spent in dalliance.

Meanwhile the crucified robbers were quite forgotten, and on the third
morning the soldier found that one of the crosses was empty, for the body
had been removed for burial by the relatives in the night. He explained
his plight to the lady, and announced his intention of committing
suicide, the proper penalty, as he said, for his neglect of duty.

But the matron was as compassionate as she was virtuous, and ‘Heaven
forfend!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear to see two such dear men both depart
from life. I would rather pay over the dead than lose the living.’ So she
told the soldier to take the husband’s body out of its receptacle and fix
it on the vacant cross. ‘The soldier gladly followed the clever lady’s
ingenious idea, and the next day people were wondering how it was that a
dead man had found his way to the cross.’

The Ephesian Widow represents the Milesian Tales at their best; at their
worst they are only to be read by those who can touch pitch and not be
defiled. In themselves they are beneath contempt, but they have a very
considerable importance in the history of the world, and especially
in the history of the relations of the sexes. The perverse ideas that
underlie them were transplanted from Ionia to Athens, and, recommended by
the literary genius of Athenian writers, they have had an influence on
later thought which the Ionian pornographers would never have secured.




V.—ATHENS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY


We have traced the main tendencies of Ionian thought, and have seen
how the degradation of women involved a corresponding degradation of
literature. Its very offensiveness protects a great deal of Ionian work
from notice, but it has been necessary to quote some of the less noisome
specimens, for it must be remembered that this immorality of literature
was both the cause and the result of the low opinion in which women were
held. The motives which inspired the whole school of writers were utterly
contemptible, the means they employed were not much better; but they were
successful in their purpose. When Athens took over the leadership of
Greece, she took over from Ionia the idea of women as inferior creatures,
and during all the great period of Athenian history women were a subject
class. It became no longer necessary to slander them; they were simply
neglected.

A woman’s life at Athens in the fifth century B.C. was a dreary business.
She was confined closely to the house, a harem prisoner, but without any
of that luxurious ease which the harem system has sometimes offered as
a solace for the loss of freedom. An Athenian house was small, dark,
and uncomfortable, and a woman’s day was occupied with a long round of
monotonous work. Occasionally she was allowed out of prison to walk in
some sacred procession, as we see the quiet line of girls marshalled on
the Parthenon frieze, but all the amusements of the town were closed
against her. From the school and the gymnasium, from the Odeon and the
Academy, from public meetings and from private banquets, women were
jealously debarred. It is doubtful whether they were permitted even
to enter the theatre of Dionysus; and their shopping quarter, where
they bought their rouge and white lead, was in the most remote and
inaccessible part of the city.

The whole structure of social life was arranged to suit men and to
exclude women. It is true that the patron divinity of the state was a
woman, Athena, but the goddess was divested of feminine attributes.
She became the ideal Athens, a conception as far remote from an
anthropomorphic divinity as any race has ever possessed.

The stages by which women were reduced to this condition of inferiority
are, in the general obscurity of early Athenian history, quite unknown;
but there can be little doubt that the whole position was due to Ionian
influence. The legal status of women, especially in relation to property,
seems to have been changed by definite enactment about the end of the
sixth century B.C., and in the _Suppliant Maidens_ of Æschylus there
are traces of the conflict of principles on which the change was based.
Henceforward, in the eyes of the Athenian law, a woman was merely an
appanage of any property which she chanced to inherit, and her nearest
male relative had to take charge of her person—a _damnosa hereditas_ for
which the material advantages of her estate served as compensation.

Moreover, women in Athens were married far too young, for the average
age was about fifteen, and the result of these early marriages was that
by the time a woman had arrived at years of discretion and might have
been an intellectual companion for her husband, her beauty too often was
gone and she herself was worn out, a premature old woman. For girls no
education was considered necessary, and throughout their childhood they
were kept in constant seclusion. They were regarded only as potential
bearers of children, and the most extreme precautions known to modern
eugenics were apparently practised before marriage. But even as mothers
they were not very efficient, for their physique suffered from the
narrowness of their lives, and the wet-nurse—Titthe—was to be found in
most families. Just as the Breton and Norman girls migrate to Paris,
so those Athenian households that could afford the expense would hire
the robust women of Sparta to take the mother’s place. Alcibiades, for
example, was suckled by a Lacedæmonian nurse, and was not altogether
an alien when, exiled from Athens, he took refuge in the Peloponnese.
It was not in Athens, but at Sparta, or in the islands where girls
wrestled and raced with young men, that Paionios found the model for his
‘Victory’ with her flying feet, deep bosom, and firm, rounded limbs;
and in Aristophanes, when Lysistrata assembles the women of Greece, the
Athenians can scarcely refrain their half-envious admiration of the buxom
vigour of the Spartan Lampeto.

At Athens the restriction of women to one function meant that even that
one function was badly performed, and all through the great period the
Athenian race was slowly declining in numbers.

In one respect alone was there little difference between the sexes at
Athens—that of dress. There was no distinction of sex, as there was
no distinction of rank. In an Attic tragedy a chorus of generals, of
fishermen, and of flower-girls would all appear in much the same garb.
In Asia both sexes wore trousers (θύλακοι, ‘bags’), which the Greeks
regarded with amused contempt. In Athens neither sex did. There were some
slight varieties in shape, material, and colour, but, speaking generally,
it is correct to say that an Athenian lady—or an Athenian gentleman was
dressed informally when she or he had one blanket draped about their
person. Full dress consisted of another blanket over the first, and the
art of dress consisted in suitable pinning and the proper arrangement of
the folds.

But when a woman left her husband’s house and went abroad, she had to don
the symbol of her slavery, the ‘kredemnon.’ This article was a kind of
yashmak-veil, drawn across the face to protect a woman from the gaze of
strange men, not her lawful owners. It gave its wearer the white cheeks
of the odalisque, and shut her off from the freedom of the outside world.
It was, like our cap and apron, the badge of servitude, and to escape
from it the only way was to become a slave indeed, for the slave-woman
alone could walk abroad with open face.

This is what Euripides means when he makes the captive Andromache sob:
‘And I, even I, was dragged from my royal bower down to the sea-beach
with nothing about my head save hideous slavery.’ (_And._ 109.)

And so Hecuba, in the _Trojan Women_, a slave bare-footed and
bare-headed, crouches on the ground to escape from the gaze of men, and
cries: ‘Guide me to my bed of straw and to the stones which now will
hide my face.’ (_Trojan Women_, 508.) Slavery in ancient times was a
hard fate, but for many an Athenian woman it could have had but little
terror. A wife was already the property of her husband, and slaves and
women are commonly classed together.

The Athenian, however, with all his faults was a genuine lover of
freedom, and did not care for slaves. Neither his wife nor the
flute-girls, whose charms could be bought by any bidder, could really
satisfy him, strange mixture that he was of sensuality and intellect.
The only women whose company he desired were those called, half in jest,
half in earnest, the Hetairai, ‘the close companions,’ the same word
being used for those political associations which formed the closest link
between man and man.

The Hetairai were foreign women, and stood outside the law: they were not
Athenian citizens, and so had no privileges; but, on the other hand, they
were not under restraint. Often highly educated, it was their business to
take part in all men’s interests: they were their own mistresses, engaged
freely in the political life of Athens, and in many cases exercised very
great influence even in affairs of state. To their personal attractions
they added social charm and a long training in the arts of pleasure, and
the contrast between them and the Athenian wives may be illustrated if we
compare the life of an actress of the _Comédie Française_ with that of an
inmate of a Turkish harem. The French actress and the Japanese geisha
are the nearest modern parallels to the Greek hetaira, and all three owe
their existence as a class to much the same social conditions, a high
standard of culture and intelligence, a low standard of sexual morality.

Such were the conditions of Athenian life, and we shall find them
reflected in literature. The great lyric poets, Simonides, Pindar,
Bacchylides, concern themselves almost exclusively with men; Æschylus
alone, in this, as in most things, the exact antithesis of the typical
Athenian, regards women as creatures possessed of mind and soul. In sharp
contrast to the tragedian is Herodotus, and a comparison between their
views is possible, for, although the historian is a considerably younger
man, a good deal of his material goes back to an earlier date, and in
social matters especially he often represents the ideas of the first
years of the fifth century.

Herodotus, great traveller and charming personality though he is, is
still a true Ionian. There is frequently a Milesian flavour about his
tales—for instance the story of Rhampsinitus and the robber—and it is
not unfair to say that in his researches into ancient tribal life and
folklore he is especially interested in such savage customs as put women
in an inferior place. The account of the native races of Libya in the
last chapters of the fourth book of the History will afford an example.

But the grandeur of his main theme, the struggle between Athens and
Persia, raised the historian from these doubtful interests, and in the
last five books of his work there is little depreciation of women as a
class. It is true that women scarcely come into the narrative, and that
Xerxes’ remark about Artemisia, ‘My men have become women and my women
have become men,’ is framed to suit the ideas of an Athenian, as it
would have suited the Romans, who could hardly conceive of a Queen. It
is scarcely as appropriate in the mouth of a Persian whose own mother,
Atossa, was then acting as regent. But this is a small point and,
speaking generally, there is little in the last part of the History to
offend.

Herodotus is really animated by an ardent patriotism and a genuine love
of liberty. ‘Isonomy,’ he says—and many English race-goers will agree
with him—‘the very sound of the word is most excellent.’ But it must be
remembered that his patriotism is for males only, and that his equality
before the law is an equality from which women were shut out; for even
Plato makes isonomy between men and women the last and almost incredible
stage of democratic licence.

So it is in the earlier books alone that the baser manner is evident, and
one example of it will suffice to give a proof of the difference between
the Ionian spirit which brought about the enslavement of women and the
spirit of enlightenment which rebelled against that servitude.

We will take the story of Io, as told by Æschylus and Herodotus, for the
ancient legends of Greece, subjects alike for history and drama, have one
great advantage: their main outlines were impersonal and known to all;
details, treatment, and interpretation could be varied to express the
artist’s personal thought. Io, the daughter of Inachus, king of Argos,
was beloved by Zeus: through the jealousy of Hera she was changed into a
cow, and after long wanderings regained her mortal shape and found rest
in Egypt, where she became mother of Epaphus, first king of the land.
Such is the legend, and this is Herodotus’ version of it:

    The Persians say that some Phœnicians once brought a cargo of
    merchandise to Argos. The women of the town, among them Io,
    came down to the sea-shore to bargain. The Phœnicians seized
    the women and carried them off to Egypt. Now to carry off women
    by violence the Persians think is the act of a wicked man; to
    trouble about avenging them is the act of a fool; to pay no
    regard to them when carried off is the part of a wise man;
    for it is clear that, if they had not wished it themselves,
    they would not be ravished. Such is the Persian account, but
    as regards Io the Phœnicians do not agree. They say that they
    used no violence in taking her to Egypt, but that she had an
    intrigue with their captain when he was at Argos. When she
    discovered that she was likely to become a mother she was
    afraid of her parents, and to hide her secret came of her own
    accord with them to Egypt.’

All the poetry and romance of the story have disappeared: realism has
triumphed. Io is a woman; on the best interpretation of her conduct
she is vain and imprudent; she shows herself to strange men, and is
carried off by them, although, as the story is at pains, though not very
logically, to add, it must have been with her own consent. On the worst
interpretation she is a mere wanton. She allows a sea-captain to seduce
her, and then deserts her home, her parents, and her native land.

Listen now to Æschylus—in the beautiful version by Mr. E. R. Bevan:

    The chambers, where I housed, a virgin hidden,
    Strange faces aye in the night would visit, wooing
    With sooth suggestion: ‘Oh, most huge in fortune,
    Most happiest of all maidens—wherefore maiden,
    Oh, wherefore so long maiden, when there waits thee
    Wedlock the highest? He, the Lord of Heaven,
    Is waxen hot, pierced with desire of thee,
    Yea, and with thee would tread the passages
    Of love’s delight. Now therefore foot not from thee,
    O child, the bed of the Highest; but do this,
    Go forth to where the meadow is deep, the field
    Of Lerna—stations of the household flock,
    Home of thy father’s herds—go even thither,
    That so the eye of Zeus may ease desire.’

    With such-like dreams the kingly dark for me
    Was ever fraught, me miserable: till, ridden,
    I gat me heart to open to my father
    The visions and the dreams of night. And he
    To Pytho, yea, and even to Dodona,
    Sent embassage on embassage, inquiring
    What thing he had need to do, or what word speak,
    To pleasure them that rule us. And they came,
    Bringing still back burden of wavering lips,
    Sentences, blind, dark syllables. At last
    A word clear-visaged came to Machus
    Enjoining plainly and saying he should thrust me
    Forth of the house, forth of the land, to wander
    At large, a separate thing even to the last
    Confines of earth.

The story is the same, but the treatment is different, and the two
passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and
realistic depreciation.

But Io, in the _Prometheus_, is only one of the gallery of Æschylus’
heroines, for in his art women take the foremost place. The dramatist
is at variance with his age, and his fervent patriotism is almost the
sole bond of union between him and his fellows. Æschylus is a mystic; he
believed in the Delphic inspiration, and took an interest in religious
speculation. His contemporaries were materialists, suspected the politics
of Delphi, and regarded religion simply as a ceremony. Æschylus was a
conservative in politics, although a liberal in thought; Athens was
already becoming an extreme democracy. Finally, Æschylus bases his
theatre on women, and makes them the chief agents of the drama, while
the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active
business of life.

But he is an unconscious feminist, and the definite purpose which we
find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays. It shows, however, a
strange lack of appreciation to reproach him, as some critics have done,
with neglecting the feminine interest. Of the seven tragedies that the
Byzantine tradition has preserved for us, four, if their subject was
handled by a modern dramatist, would be called feminist problem plays,
and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic
interest, even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them
in the second plan of action.

Of the lost plays, many, as far as we may judge by their titles and
meagre fragments, have the same characteristic. The most famous, the
_Niobe_, had for its central figure the sorrowing mother, such another
as Euripides’ Hecuba in the first scene of the _Trojan Women_, and
represented perhaps in much the same fashion, for Æschylus, like most
Athenian women, knew full well the dramatic value of silence, and the
pathos of Niobe’s situation needs no long speeches. So, if we possessed
the _Callisto_, the legend of the maiden changed into a bear, the
_Penelope_, the _Iphigenia_, or the _Oreithyia_, that favourite Athenian
story of the young girl roaming on the sea-shore and carried off by
the fierce god to his northern fastness, we should appreciate even more
vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedian’s art. It
is a significant fact in this connection that of the sixty odd titles
of lost plays which have come down to us, nearly half are names of
women. Moreover, in seventeen of these plays, the title is taken from
the chorus, and in the Æschylean Theatre the chorus is generally the
central figure in the dramatic action. Such titles as the ‘Daughters
of the Sun,’ the ‘Nurses of Dionysus,’ the ‘Daughters of Nereus,’ and
the ‘Bacchanal Women,’ suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong
feminine interest; such others as the ‘Women of the Bedchamber,’ the
‘Water-carriers,’ and the ‘Women of Etna,’ might well be examples of that
realistic treatment of women’s life of which we have an example in the
Nurse of the ‘Libation-bearers.’ Arguments drawn merely from the names
of lost plays are obviously of little value, except in so far as they
strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply,
but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the
first and greatest of Athenian dramatists was deeply impressed with the
potentialities for good and evil of the female mind.




VI.—ÆSCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES


Of the seven plays of Æschylus that remain, three—the _Seven against
Thebes_, the _Persians_, and the _Prometheus_—are concerned with battles,
and with strife among men and among gods. It might be expected that women
here would play but a small part, but, as a matter of fact, in two of the
three the chorus, the intermediary between poet and audience, is composed
of women, and in the third a woman is the chief character.

The _Seven against Thebes_ is a patriotic drama, ‘crammed full of the
spirit of war,’ as the poet himself describes it, and also full of
speeches. The male characters talk; what little action there is in the
play falls to the women of the chorus. Their first song, for example,
when they call on the gods to save them from the ravages of war, was
probably accompanied by more vigorous movements than anything in the rest
of the tragedy. The unsympathetic male, Eteocles, addresses them, it
is true, as ‘unbearable creatures’ and ‘detestable animals,’ and says,
‘For my own part, I never want to share my house with any womankind, nor
take them to my troubles and my joys;’ but his remarks are strictly
in keeping with his unpleasant character, and the poet instinctively
relies on the female characters for his chief dramatic interest. So in
the _Persians_, a chronicle play composed mainly of choral odes and
messengers’ speeches, the queen-mother, Atossa, takes the first place
in the action, and the psychological contrast lies between her womanly
strength and Xerxes’ manly weakness. In the _Prometheus_, certainly, most
of the characters—gods and demi-gods—are males, but they have little
dramatic significance. As far as they are concerned, the play is a good
example of what Maeterlinck calls the ‘static drama.’ The characters
stand still, _and talk_. The action is in the hands of the female
characters, the pathetic figure of the wandering cow-maiden, Io, and the
contrasted group of the mermaid chorus, the daughters of the sea. These
latter are perhaps the most charming of all the poet’s creations, and
the fragrance that heralds their approach, when, casting away modesty,
they venture to appear before a man, spreads through the whole play.
Sympathising, but not quite without merriment; inquisitive, but staunch
in the hour of danger; they are just such characters as Nausicaa herself.

In these three plays, then, the feminine interest has forced its way, as
it were, into the plot, which in its first form offered women no place.
The _Seven against Thebes_, a ‘fragment from the table of Homer,’ differs
chiefly from the epic in the feminine element that has been imported
by the chorus; the _Persians_, dealing with the same events as those
described by Herodotus, has for its point of difference the prominence
given to the female character, Atossa; the _Prometheus_, which tells the
story of the conflict between the fierce young god and the philanthropic
old demiurge, relies for its dramatic interest largely on the episodes of
the Nereides and Io; episodes which, strictly speaking, have nothing to
do with the main plot.

This feminism, inherent in the poet’s mind, finds full expression in
the remaining four plays. The _Suppliant Women_, for example, archaic
though it seems to us, deals with a social problem and a question of
law, which was hotly debated in the poet’s time, and finally, in spite
of his advocacy, settled against the women. The question is this—‘Should
a woman be compelled to marry a man she dislikes, and to hand over to
him the control of her property, merely because he is the nearest male
relative?’ Æschylus answers in the negative; Athenian law _decided in the
affirmative_.

The characters in the play are nearly all women, the fifty daughters of
Danaus, accompanied by their old father, who have fled from Egypt to
Greece in order to escape from the violence of their cousins, the sons
of Ægyptus, who wish to marry them by force. It is a lyric drama, and the
burden of the action and the music rests with the women. The agony of the
crowd of girls crouching helpless at the altar is depicted in the most
entrancing melody; they are not regarded as separate individuals, but as
representing women in general; their plight is that of all womankind, and
the problem is presented as universal. Swarthy daughters of the South,
they call upon their god to help them, the god who once found delight
in the arms of their ancestress, Io; and in the play their prayer is
answered. The King of Argos protects and gives them shelter, the Egyptian
herald who would have taken them back is scornfully dismissed. Of the
three male characters Danaus is the most interesting, and his advice to
his daughters is applicable to women generally in ancient times:

    Children, you must be prudent: let your utterance be attended
    before all by absence of boldness: a modest face and a tranquil
    eye: no wanton looks. Be not forward in your speech nor prolix:
    people here are very prone to take offence. And remember to be
    submissive—you are needy foreign fugitives—it is not seemly for
    the weak to be bold in speech.

So in his concluding words he hints at some of the difficulties of a
woman’s life:

    I charge you, bring me not to shame, you whose youthful bloom
    is so attractive to men. Ripe tender fruit is never easy to
    protect; men are like animals, they seek only to destroy. Your
    gardens fair, the lady of love herself proclaims their dewy
    freshness, and when a virgin comes in dainty loveliness every
    man as he passes by falls victim to desire, and shoots a swift
    glance to win her fancy.... Observe, then, this your father’s
    charge, and value chastity more than life itself.

The _Suppliant Women_ presents one particular phase of women’s subjection
considered impersonally, and scarcely deals with the great question of
how far force may be rightly met by force. In the legend the daughters
of Danaus escape from slavery by killing their husbands on their wedding
night, but of that Æschylus in this play tells us nothing.

The problem, however, is too vital to escape his notice, and it forms the
central motive of the greatest play in world-literature, the _Agamemnon_.
‘Is a woman ever justified in killing her husband?’ The question had a
special interest in Athens, as it must have in any society where women
are kept enslaved, for the tyrant always walks in dread of the assassin’s
knife. Euripides, with his stinging irony, reveals the secret fear:
‘If women are to be allowed to shed male blood,’ he makes Orestes cry,
‘then we men had better commit suicide at once; if it is a matter only
of the will to kill, we may be sure that all women have that already.’
The _Agamemnon_ deals with this problem; the sequel plays with a second
question, ‘Is it right for a son to kill his mother in order to avenge
his father’s death?’

But the trilogy of the _Oresteia_, besides being concerned with feminist
problems, is a living gallery of woman types: Clytemnestra and Cassandra,
Electra and the Nurse, the chorus of maidens in the _Choephoroi_, and
the chorus of women furies in the _Eumenides_. In the _Agamemnon_ the
two women are sharply contrasted; Clytemnestra, the queen who will not
submit to man’s rule; Cassandra, the victim predestined by fate to
suffer the caprices of a master, and to pass from the treacherous lover,
Apollo, to the brutal owner, Agamemnon. No one can read the play and feel
much sympathy with the murdered king. He is done to death with every
circumstance of horror; returning home after many years’ absence in a
foreign land, where he has been fighting for his country, he finds within
his house not a faithful wife, but a secret enemy; she conceals her
hatred, allures him to the bath, and there, with her own hands, murders
him.

And yet the dramatist, and his readers, find the wife rather than
the husband the sympathetic character. It is partly the intolerable
callousness and brutal pride of Agamemnon, who has sacrificed his
daughter’s life to help on his political schemes, and now brings home
with him from Troy the concubine whom he has compelled to share his bed.
But there is also the feeling that Clytemnestra is really the better man
of the pair: that she is naturally born to rule, and that her subjection
to a man would be against the law of nature. Certainly in the play she
takes the first place, and Cassandra, a part vocally the most important
of any, comes next. The men, Agamemnon, the Watchman, the Herald,
Ægisthus, and the helpless chorus of aged councillors, are merely foils
to the ‘manlike’ queen. The contrast, indeed, between the resolute woman
and the irresolute men in the closing scenes is almost comic, and the
play ends with her triumph. In the sequel, _The Libation Bearers_, the
main action is again in the hands of women, Electra and her friends, the
maidens of the chorus. Orestes, it is true, does the actual killing; but
there is this difference between brother and sister: Electra acts on her
own initiative, and is a woman as strong-willed as Clytemnestra herself;
Orestes acts only in obedience to the promptings of others. Electra feels
no remorse; Orestes, as soon as he has killed his mother, is tormented
by imaginary terrors. Among the characters of the second play, by far
the most interesting is the old Nurse. She is obviously studied from the
life, and is one of the most vivid figures of Greek Drama: her kindly
temper and affection for her former charge are contrasted with the
fierce bitterness of Electra, and she supplies the one touch of humour
that lightens the mournful music of this play.

Last comes the _Eumenides_, which discusses with almost embarrassing
frankness the physical problems of relationship. ‘Is the mother who
conceives, or the father who begets the child, the nearer relative?’ And
again, ‘Is not the murder of a husband, who is no relation by blood, less
heinous than the murder of the mother who brought you into the world?’
These are some of the questions that are raised but not answered, for the
final reconciliation satisfies the religious rather than the practical
sense. The plot may be put briefly:

A band of women are pursuing a man over the earth; pursuing relentlessly
until he shall die of fatigue. Whenever the pursuit slackens, another
woman—or rather her spirit—urges on the chase. The man appeals in vain
for help from men, and at last a third woman by skilful diplomacy
persuades the avengers—or at least some of them—to agree to a
reconciliation.

Such is the Æschylean theatre; but, as we have said, Æschylus is a
lonely spirit in Athens. The general view of women is represented by
the next generation, Pericles, Sophocles, and Thucydides, the greatest
statesman, dramatist, and historian of their time. The last of the
three is particularly significant. You may read through his History
from beginning to end—and if you are a student of affairs you will not
find any other book in the world quite so valuable—but, concerning
one-half of the human race, you will get scarcely a word. Even in the
hortatory speeches, when soldiers are being encouraged to fight for their
possessions, women only come in the second place after the children. In
the rest of the History they are practically never mentioned.

To Thucydides, women, even such a woman as Aspasia, hardly existed.
Politics were to him the serious business, war the great game of life,
and in neither of these did women take part. He probably would have
agreed with his hero Pericles, ‘a woman’s highest glory is not to fall
below the standard of such natural powers as she possesses: that woman
is best of whom there is the least talk among men, whether in the way of
praise or blame.’

In his indifference the historian faithfully follows the example of the
statesman. Pericles, of whose mistress, Aspasia, we hear so much, and
of whose wife, the mother of his sons, we hear so little, appears never
to have considered the part that nature has assigned to women in the
creation and management of a state. In his day Athens was faced by a war
that in one year robbed her of many of the bravest of her sons. A state
funeral was given them at which, as Thucydides tells us: ‘Any one who
wished, stranger or citizen, could be present: even women were there
to mourn for their relatives at the grave.’ At the end of the ceremony
Pericles made that Funeral Oration in praise of Athens of which echoes
are to be found in all contemporary Greek literature. Most of the speech
dwells resolutely on the glory of these heroic deaths and the grandeur
of the sacrifices made, but at the last the orator condescends to human
feeling and addresses some noble words of comfort to the men before him,
taking them in succession as fathers, sons, and brothers of the dead.
Then comes the one final cold sentence addressed not to the mothers, but
to the widows in his audience: ‘a few words of advice,’ Pericles calls
it, and it is the language of reproof rather than that of sympathy.

Their ignorance of women made even the greatest minds in Athens
insensible to women’s true position, and in the case of Thucydides there
is a further reason. When the historian came to compose his work he was
too bitterly disillusioned to concern himself with anything but his main
subject, the failure of Athens to maintain the Periclean system. In a
world where blind chance seemed to rule and the highest political ideals
went unrealised, the social position of women may well have seemed to him
a trifle.

But Thucydides’ testimony is chiefly negative: we get clearer evidence
from Sophocles. Sophocles is the typical Athenian, versatile and
ingratiating, ‘_eutrapelos, eukolos_.’ Actor, poet, priest, and general,
he was one of the most popular men of his time—_with men_. Of his family
life we have not quite such a brilliant picture. His wife is one of
the many anonymous women, the wives of great men. His children did not
apparently regard their father with as much affection as did the outside
world, and in his old age tried to deprive him of the control of his
property. As to women, and the softer affections of life, outside his own
writing we have the anecdote in Plato’s _Republic_. The poet in his old
age was asked how he felt in regard to love: ‘Hush, hush,’ he replied; ‘I
have escaped and right gladly. I feel like a slave who has escaped from a
mad master.’

That was the feeling which the conditions of life at Athens engendered.
Woman and woman’s love was a necessary weakness: happy the man who could
break free, and if we believe the stories in Athenæus, Sophocles also
in escaping from women fell into the Ionian snare. In his plays women
are generally a negligible quantity; at least the only women whom he
succeeds in making lifelike are the slave women, the ministering angels
like Deianira and Tecmessa who meekly respect their master’s words, ‘oft
dinned into their ears’—‘Woman, for women silence is the finest robe.’

Tecmessa, beautiful character though she is, and far superior to Ajax
in moral strength, has no independent existence apart from her lord and
master. Deianira, deserted by her errant husband, has no thought of
resentment: she only wants to get her master back, and is prepared to
stoop to any means if she may regain his company. And it is obvious that
these two ladies, who would make a modern woman despair, are Sophocles’
ideals of feminine excellence.

Of the other plays, the _Œdipus Tyrannus_ contains only one woman
character—Jocasta; the mother married to her own son, a dreadful figure,
and one almost impossible to dramatise successfully. In the play she
takes only a minor part, and her silent exit is the most effective touch;
but it is interesting here to compare Sophocles with Euripides, who in
the _Phœnician Women_ does succeed in making Jocasta a real and most
pathetic figure. The _Œdipus at Colonus_ has the two girls, Antigone and
Ismene, but they are sexless and dramatically only important as types of
girlish devotion. The _Philoctetes_, like the two Œdipus plays, has a
male chorus and alone among Greek tragedies, if we except the _Rhesus_,
has no female characters. It is also, whatever the reason, the dullest
play we possess.

There remain the _Electra_ and the _Antigone_, and the first of these
is a signal example of the importance for a dramatist of choice of
subject. Æschylus and Euripides have both left us plays dealing with
the same story, and a comparison with the three tragedies will reveal
the essential differences between the three poets. A dramatist must
share—imaginatively at least—in his characters’ thoughts; and women
like Clytemnestra and Electra were so beyond the range of Sophocles’
experience and sympathy that he is quite unable to make them live. Like
everything that Sophocles wrote, the _Electra_ is full of literary
accomplishment. The epic method, for example, is most ingeniously adapted
to the theatre, and a vivid narrative of the chariot race in which
Orestes is supposed to meet his death forms the centre of the play, but
there is no real grip on the dramatic situation: it is literature, not
life.

In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the poet is dealing with a subject
thoroughly congenial to his temperament, the conflict between law and the
individual, and one independent of sex, and the play is a magnificent
example of his art.

Here certainly the central figure is a woman, or, at least, a girl; but
the interest does not depend upon her sex, for little dramatic use is
made of the Hæmon episode. It is not her sex but her social position that
affects the problem of the play, a problem vital enough in itself without
any sex interest—‘How far is an individual justified in setting his or
her conscience against the law of the State?’

Antigone is a girl orphan, born out of legal wedlock, a slave without a
master; and it is a crowning stroke of irony to pit her lonely figure
against the majesty of man-made law. To modern readers she seems
intensely pathetic, and an Athenian audience would, doubtless, have
sympathised with her as a rebel, if not as a woman. There is no word
in Greek for ‘to command,’ and their only word for ‘to obey’ means
literally ‘to allow oneself to be persuaded,’ so that the conscientious
objector was not uncommon. But Sophocles had been a general, and knew by
experience the way of Athenian soldiers, and it is not certain that he
appreciates his heroine’s wilfulness in quite so favourable a light; for,
as we see in his other plays, he was essentially on the side of law. He
was rather an observer, with a wonderful command of language, than an
original thinker or critic of the established order; and it is a curious
turn of fortune for a poet, who had by no means a close or a sympathetic
knowledge of woman’s character, that the _Antigone_, the only play where
a woman takes a vital part, should be by far the greatest of his works.

The titles and fragments of his lost plays confirm the impression given
by the extant tragedies. We have nearly a hundred names of lost plays,
and barely one-fifth are called after women. Moreover, a consideration
of the titles of those plays that bear one woman’s name will reveal the
fact that the majority were probably rather anti-feminist than feminist.
Helen, Eriphylë, Pandora, Procris, Tyro: Helen, who deserted her husband
and her home; Eriphylë, who sold her husband for gold; Pandora, the
incarnate cause of trouble among men; Procris, bought by a paramour;
Tyro, seduced by a second lover: the legends of these ladies were
arranged to please the Athenian public. Venal and fickle creatures, they
show plainly how necessary it is to keep a close guard over women, and it
may be suspected that Sophocles, in his treatment of the plot, did not
disappoint the expectations of his audience.

In five plays only is the title taken from the chorus, the _Spartan
Women_, the _Lemnian Women_, the _Water-carriers_, the _Women of Scyros_,
and the _Captive Women_; and it is very unlikely, considering the titles,
that any one of the five was written with much sympathy with feminine
ideals. ‘Spartan’ and ‘Lemnian’ women were at Athens almost proverbial
for ‘unwomanly’ females; a ‘Water-carrier’ was synonymous with a gossip.
Of the other two we have a little definite information. Philostratus
tells us that the _Women of Scyros_ treated of the not very pleasant
tale of the young Achilles, disguised as a girl in the king’s harem,
and becoming there the father of Neoptolemus, by the young princess,
Deidameia. Of the _Captive Women_ we know that it had the same plot as
Euripides’ _Trojan Women_, but the incidents were treated—_humorously_.
It is not, perhaps, impossible that an author even to-day might regard
the troubles of women in war as a fit subject for a jest; but things
have advanced so far that we should hardly regard him now as a flawless
genius, or hold him up as the highest product of our civilisation.




VII.—EURIPIDES


All Greek literature has one peculiar quality. As the tribe of scholiasts
and translators have found from the beginning, it lends itself to
interpretation; and Euripides has suffered more than most authors from
his interpreters. The ancient belief that Euripides was a misogynist is
still sometimes held, and such a misconception is not altogether our own
fault. It is partly due to Euripides himself, for the poet’s favourite
weapon is irony, and irony is a double-edged sword which can be turned
against those who dare to use it. Euripides does not say plainly and
straightforwardly ‘You men think yourselves naturally superior to women:
braver, more truthful, more unselfish: in reality this superiority is
a mere figment of your imagination.’ Neither the poet nor his audience
would have cared for such brutal frankness. Euripides exhibits the
facts of life, with some little malicious arrangement, and leaves the
judgment to others. He is too good an artist, as indeed were Æschylus and
Sophocles, to make all his women angels and all his men the reverse. Many
of his women have very obvious faults, so that if you come to his plays
with a fixed and comfortable conviction of the superiority of man, and
can shut your eyes to more than half of the action you will probably find
in what remains convincing proof of woman’s weakness.

But often our belief in Euripides’ misogyny has quite another source: our
inveterate habit of taking a joke seriously. Aristophanes, who probably
knew Euripides—the man and his plays—better than anyone in this world,
represents him as a woman-hater in danger from woman’s vengeance. We draw
the inference that Euripides did really dislike women.

Now the exact opposite of the truth was what the audience at the
performance of an Attic comedy expected. It was allowed, it was
considered proper in the case of a comic poet, that he should turn his
facts upside down. Socrates, for example, always professed himself unable
to teach anything and thought the practice of taking fees for teaching
immoral. _Therefore_, he is represented in the ‘Clouds’ as keeping a
school and teaching for hire. Euripides is the champion of woman’s
equality; _therefore_, he is represented by Aristophanes as a misogynist.

There are similar cases in our own social life. An intelligent foreigner,
if he read our literature at the time of a general election and took
the election posters seriously, would form a very wrong idea of the
estimation in which—we will say the Prime Minister—is held by most of
his countrymen. A perversion of the facts is even with us regarded as
humorous in politics, and it is thus that we should regard Aristophanes.
Classical scholars, however, have always been a serious class and while
they recognise the grossness of Aristophanes they often fail to see his
humour. The irony of Euripides and the humour of Aristophanes are both
alien to the Puritan spirit, when they are understood, and to appreciate
the first it is necessary to make a close study of all the plays.
Euripides was, first of all, a dramatist, and his main business is with
his play. But behind the playwright stands the poet and idealist, a man
not at all inclined to look on life with philosophic detachment, but
feeling, as deeply and as bitterly as any man has ever done, the basis of
injustice on which too often human society has been reared.

Euripides championed the cause of woman’s freedom against the decadents
of Ionia as he championed the cause of religious freedom against the
reactionaries of Delphi. He realised that the best method of defence is
to attack the other side: that successful defence is impossible, unless
at any rate you are prepared to take the aggressive. Open militancy in
his case was impossible, for the dramatic poet was ostensibly a servant
of the state and the majority, but by no means all, of his countrymen
supported the doctrines of the infallibility of the Delphian god and the
Athenian man, so that he is compelled to work in exactly the opposite
method to that of the misogynists. He does not labour his argument: he
does not paint with a heavy brush. If you like to disregard this point of
view you can do so, and still find much that is supremely interesting—his
gift of vivid narrative, the light music of his verse, and his
unrivalled sense of dramatic effect. But every dramatist, consciously or
unconsciously, has some groundwork of thought, some criticism of life,
which will appear more or less plainly through the dramatic action of his
plays. In Euripides that criticism is directed chiefly to the testing of
three assumptions current in his day: that God reveals his purposes to
men, that war has an ennobling effect on a nation and on individuals,
that women are by nature inferior to men.

With the first two of these dogmas we are not now concerned. As to the
real nature of Euripides’ ideas on the third, we shall get the clearest
view if we consider first the characters of his theatre, then the general
body of his plays, and lastly, those four dramas which are particularly
concerned with the relations between men and women.

The two sexes may be sub-divided, according to Greek fashion, into six
classes: Old man, man, young man, old woman, woman, young woman; and it
must be acknowledged at once that Euripides, like most Greeks, is quite
lacking in any reverence for age. His old men are apt to be dotards and
are treated with humorous contempt. Amphitryon in the Hercules is a type:
he lives in a world of illusion: he sees visions and dreams dreams, but
when serious counsel or vigorous action are necessary he is useless.
Cadmus and Teiresias in the Bacchæ are characters of the same sort.
They are meant to be humorous, and the scene in which the two old men,
wagging their hoary heads, prepare to dance and sing is pure burlesque.
Cadmus agrees with Amphitryon in his religious views: he is ready to
accept the miraculous, if it is profitable; and he scarcely troubles to
make any pretence. As regards the divinity of the new god Dionysus, his
sentiments are that, as ‘The fellow anyhow is my daughter’s son: it is my
duty as head of the family to make out that he is a great god’. Cadmus
and Amphitryon are at least partly self-deceived; Ægeus is a mere butt.
The old gentleman, who believes that his virility can be restored by
magic art, is a child in Medea’s hands, and the scene between the two is
Aristophanic in its outspoken frankness.

Generally speaking, old men in Euripides are impotent: when they are
allowed to act, their energies—Tyndareus for example, and the old
servant in the Ion—are mischievous. In one case only do old men play
a worthy part; when they are resisting the wanton violence of some
full-grown man who is attacking women and children. Sometimes, as with
Peleus and Iolaus, they succeed; sometimes they fail; but in either case
their essential weakness is a foil to the presumptuous strength of their
opponent.

Coming now to the second class, that of grown men, we get three main
types: there is the mean man, the blusterer, and the simpleton. Jason
and Admetus are mean men: mean, selfish and cowardly: capable of asking
a woman to save their lives at the risk of her own, but incapable of
gratitude. Still they are handsome, good company, and quite unconscious
of their own shortcomings. Menelaus is a worse type and one that the
poet especially disliked. He adds to meanness the vices of cruelty and
treachery and is the slave of passion. In the Orestes he is coldly
treacherous, in the Andromache treacherous and cruel, in the other plays
where he appears merely despicable. Then come the blusterers: Agamemnon
and Heracles, Lycus and Eurystheus. The first two are the ordinary
sensual man: brave enough and capable of great deeds, but unfaithful,
untruthful and self-indulgent: they seem to be strong, and they are
strong in body; but they have no strength of mind. Lycus and Eurystheus
are men of a lower type, mere bullies depending solely on force, and
Euripides does not attempt to make them interesting. Lastly, there
are the simpletons: Xuthus, Thoas and Theoclymenus—an easy prey for
the clever women—the Priestess, Iphigenia, Helen who use them as they
will. They are the men who with advancing age will be such as Ægeus and
Amphitryon. And they almost exhaust the list in our second class. There
remain only Theseus, a patriotic abstraction, the male counterpart of
Athena; Creon, ‘the King’—the name is given to more than one person—an
official rather than a living character; and some few persons in the
second plan of action: such as the herald Talthybius and the peasant
farmer in the Electra. These two latter occupy very subordinate
positions, but they are in every way more manly, more generous, more
lovable than the great men whom they serve. If we except them, there is
not a grown man in the whole theatre of Euripides who can be regarded
with sympathy.

When we come to the young men we are in a brighter world. Euripides is
essentially the poet of youth, and his younger characters are always
lovable. The heroic boy Menœceus and the kind lad Ion are figures drawn
with a tender hand. But soon the shadows of the prison house draw in,
and the slight hardness which is visible even in Ion becomes intensified
in Achilles, and still more in Hippolytus. The older the person, the
less attractive he becomes. Achilles and Hippolytus are very much like
the public school boy of our day; in many spheres of conduct they are
thoroughly reliable: truthful, self-denying and courageous: but they
are cruelly hampered by the influence of an environment which shuts
out the influence of woman at the most impressionable time of a man’s
life. Hippolytus is something of a prig and into his mouth, in the
well-known speech, Euripides puts all the stock invective against women.
The words are not the lad’s own views: he is too young to have had much
experience of women, good or bad: they are literature, the views of other
men expressed in books and unconsciously assimilated by the younger
generation.

Hippolytus is an ascetic and exaggerates: Achilles is a more manly
character. His first impulses are generous, but he does not carry them
into effect, for he is too much under the influence of other people’s
opinion: ‘good form’ is his guide in life. He has moreover, all a young
man’s vanity. ‘Countless girls are setting traps to catch me as husband’
he says; and he is deeply hurt to think that he is not consulted—‘I would
have agreed to her death, if I had been asked, but I was not; so I will
help you.’ This is the best champion that Clytemnestra can find to save
her daughter.

The remaining five characters, men unmarried, but full-grown, are less
interesting. Pentheus is the typical ‘self-pleaser’: wilful, violent and
intolerant. That he happens to be right in his particular case does not
make him more sympathetic nor does it alter the justice of his fate. His
mode of thought is wrong. Savage repression is not the way to deal with
a cause which enlists women as its chief votaries and is kept active by
their enthusiasm. The other pairs, Orestes and Pylades, Eteocles and
Polynices, require little notice. All four have the curse of Cain upon
them: they draw the sword and fall by the sword. They are murderers first
and foremost, and chiefly interesting to the criminologist.

So much then for Euripides’ men. Let us now contrast them in their
monotony of type—impute it to the poet or the sex as you will—with the
infinite variety of his women: Phædra, Andromache, Hermionë, Creüsa,
Megara, Helen, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Medea. There is every shade
of conduct here and nearly every form of marital complication, if we
remember that none of these wives are in love with their husbands and
that romantic affection between husband and wife is impossible. They
are all—when they have children—mothers first and wives afterwards; the
childless woman—Hermionë and, apparently, Creüsa—is embittered by her
state and her conduct also is abnormal: she is anxious to take life
because she has not given life.

The poet is at pains to show the impossibility of married love under
Greek conditions. Phædra is married to an old man, who years before had
seduced her sister. Andromache has been forcibly taken by the son of the
man who slew her first husband. Hermionë has been compelled for political
reasons to give up her cousin-lover and marry a stranger. Medea after
abandoning everything for her husband is deserted by him. Creüsa has been
seduced as a girl and as a ‘pis aller’ has married an elderly man. Megara
has been abandoned by her roving husband: she and her children are on the
point of being killed by a stranger when Heracles returns and murders
them himself. Helen runs away from her lord; Clytemnestra has no words
bad enough to use of hers.

None of these women are impeccable—Alcestis is the only flawless
character and she is meant to be a saint—their tempers are as composite
as we find them in real life; but, however wrong or mistaken some of
their actions may be, not one is altogether unsympathetic. So with the
old women. They are sometimes malignant, but they are never contemptible.
Their worst deeds are prompted by maternal affection. Phædra’s
foster-mother is a mischievous and immoral old lady, but her only wish
is to gratify her foster child. Hecuba takes a ruthless vengeance on
the Thracian king, but she is a mother avenging a murdered son. It is a
favourite motive with Euripides; the pathos of the old mother, her sons
killed, her daughters ravished, her grandchildren sold into slavery.
Hecuba in the _Trojan Women_, Jocasta in the _Phœnician Women_, the
chorus of old women in the _Suppliants_: all represent the reverse side
of war’s pomp and glory. The men triumph and the women suffer. The method
is realistic: there is little romance, in the baser sense of the word, in
these unkempt, miserable, old figures, and yet they supply the poet with
some of his most poignant passages.

But Euripides is especially successful with his pictures of young girls,
virgin martyrs—the type is not extinct—anxious and willing to sacrifice
themselves for their male relatives. Iphigenia, Polyxena and Macaria are
subtle variations of one character, and upon the figure of the first the
poet spends all his skill. At the time of the sacrifice at Aulis she is
a sentimental girl, so full of timid modesty that the very thought of
marriage fills her with shame. ‘I hid my face,’ she says, ‘in the soft
wrappings of my veil and would not take my baby brother in my arms nor
kiss my sister on the lips—I felt ashamed before them. No, I laid up for
myself many a fond embrace which I would give them when I should come
back, a married woman.’ The arguments she uses to her mother to justify
her sacrifice are poor enough: vague talk of honour, patriotism and the
insignificance of women—’Tis better that one man should live than ten
thousand women’; but her heart is right.

For Iphigenia both marriage and sacrifice prove a delusion. She never
returns home; she is defrauded of the joy of motherhood, and spends
many years of lonely virginity among strangers and in a strange land.
When we see her again she is a bitter woman, more sensible, indeed,
than the simple girl, but infinitely less lovable. Her thoughts are
all of vengeance: against Menelaus, against Helen, against mankind.
She performs her horrible task of human sacrifice with no very great
reluctance; ‘Parcelling out a tear in sympathy for kindred blood’ when
any Greek victims fall into her hands; but killing them all the same.
For one person alone she still cherishes some affection, her brother
Orestes, whom she had left a baby at home, and on him she concentrates
her frustrated motherhood.

The final stage of this rancour against life is seen in the character of
Iphigenia’s sister Electra—‘the unwed’—as we have her in the Orestes and
the play that bears her name.

Electra’s loneliness and suffering, her long brooding, her craving for
revenge have turned her mad: she again has only one sound sentiment, her
love for her brother. She is a dreadful figure, but a real one. Fire and
the knife: murder, treachery, arson: she is ready for all. Her character
is the logical outcome of many years of injuries and insults: of denial
of rights and of subjection. She is a proud spirit and will not submit,
but her pride cannot alter the situation. At last the strain of hopeless
rebellion is too great, and she becomes mad.

They make, indeed, a gloomy picture, these unmarried women, for Euripides
does not shrink from the darker side of a woman’s revolt. As Medea
bitterly says ‘Even a bad husband is better than none,’ and for the
unwedded girl there are only two alternatives, a voluntary sacrifice,
such as that whereby Macaria escapes from life, or a hopeless struggle
against the powers that be, such as Electra tries to wage.

We have now taken all the characters of the Euripidean theatre, except
one, and that one the most important of all—the permanent character of
tragedy, the chorus.

The chorus is the ideal spectator, the intermediary between audience and
actor, the interpreter of the poet’s own thoughts. It might be expected
that a poet who was a feminist at heart would usually have his chorus
composed of women, while a poet who had little sympathy with women would
prefer a chorus of men. In our extant plays this is exactly what happens.
It is a curious fact that most of the received ideas about the Greek
drama; the chorus of elders, the statuesque movements, the dignity of
tragedy, etc., etc., are drawn from the theatre of Sophocles, the most
academic of the three dramatists: they would never be deduced from the
usage of Æschylus or Euripides.

In the seven plays of Æschylus, the chorus is composed five times of
women, twice only of men. In both cases they are old men, and the
weakness of their old age is necessary to the dramatic action. In
Sophocles the proportion is exactly reversed. The chorus is five times
composed of men, twice of women. Moreover, it is not the dramatic
action that fixes either the sex or the age of the chorus in the Œdipus
Tyrannus, the Œdipus Colonus, or the Antigone. In the latter play,
indeed, most readers will feel that a chorus of women would be more
appropriate; the chorus with Sophocles are old men because the old man is
the poet’s ideal character.

Of the seventeen plays of Euripides, in only three cases—the Heracles,
the Heraclidæ and the Alcestis—is the chorus composed of men. In the
first two cases, as in Æschylus, the ineffectiveness of old men in actual
danger is part of the plot; the chorus strengthens the impression made
by Iolaus and Amphitryon. In the Alcestis, that the chorus are men is
part of the general irony of the play.

In the other fourteen plays the chorus is composed of women, and it is
into the mouth of these women that Euripides puts all the most intimate
part of his work. Sometimes it is a scene of home life as in the Hecuba
where a woman describes her last night in Troy.

‘It was at midnight that ruin came. Dinner was over and upon men’s eyes
sweet sleep began to spread. All the songs had been sung: my lord had
done with the sacrificial feast and its revelry and was lying in my
bower, spear on peg, for no longer had he to keep watch against the
throng of shipmen who had set foot on our Ilian land of Troy. As for me,
one ringlet of hair I had still to bring to order under my tight-bound
snood, and I was gazing into the infinite reflections of my golden
mirror ere I should throw myself upon the pillows of my bed. But lo! a
cry went through the city and a cheer rang out in Troy-town—“Sons of the
Greeks—when, ah when, will you sack the watch tower of Ilion and get you
home at last?” Then I fled from my dear couch, with only my smock upon
me, like some Dorian maid, and crouched by Artemis’ holy shrine. But woe
is me, no help found I there. My own man, my bed-fellow, I saw slain
before me; and then I was dragged down to the sea shore, and in anguish
swooned away.’

Sometimes it is a vivid description of outdoor life, such as the picture
of the washing-place, where the humbler sort of women could meet and
enjoy a little leisure, ‘that pleasant evil,’ and gossip together. ‘There
is a rock that drips, men say, with water from the Ocean’s bed and sends
from the cliff an ever-running stream, for us to catch in our pitchers.
There I met a friend who was washing pieces of fresh-dyed cloth in the
river water and laying them in the warm sun upon the flat stones. From
her lips first this news of my lady came to me.’

Every mood of a woman’s mind is represented: now sad—

    ‘Discordant is the music of a woman’s life: pitiable
    helplessness is her lot, an evil housemate, indeed. There
    is the trouble of child birth, the trouble of woman’s
    weakness.’—(_Hippolytus._)

or—

    ‘A censorious thing is womankind. If women get a small basis
    for scandal they soon add more. Women take a kind of pleasure
    in talking insincerely about one another.’—(_Phoenissae._)

now triumphant—

    ‘Children, promise of children’s children to be,
    Children to help their sorrow, to make more sweet their pleasure,
    To speak with their enemy!
    Rather, I say, than gold, than a palace of pride,
    Give me children at home, right heritors of my blood.
    Let the miser plead for the childless side:
    I will none of it. Wealth denied,
    Children given, I bless them and cleave to the better good’
                                     —(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)

or—

    A strange and wondrous thing for women are the children they
    bear in travail. Womankind loves a baby.—(_Phoenissae._)

All the questions of sex are considered and judged with clearest sense.

    ‘Man’s love when it is excessive is neither excellent nor,
    indeed, creditable. But still, sex is a divine thing and
    a gracious, if kept within bounds. A moderate temper, for
    that I pray: avaunt, contentious anger and the ceaseless
    bickering that drives a husband astray to another woman’s
    arms.’—(_Medea._)

Sometimes the question takes a wider range as in the difficult chorus of
the Iphigenia in Aulis.

‘The stuff of which men and women are made is different: their ways are
different too. But what is really good, of that there is no doubt. The
different methods of rearing and education have a great influence on
ideas of excellence. Humble modesty is a form of wisdom; and yet it is
wondrous good to use your own judgment and see your duty for yourself.
Then life is honourable and your frame grows not old. It is a great
thing to seek after excellence. For us women the quest is secret down the
secret ways of love; for men the marshalled state and the thronging crowd
make a city to increase and prosper.’

But the topic on which Euripides insists most is the scandal of
literature, the unfair ideas of woman that have been created and fostered
by the perversity of writers. Two quotations will suffice. One from the
Ion:—

    ‘Ye scandal-masters of the lyre,
    That harping still upon the lust
    Of losel women never tire,
    Her lewdness ever, now be just.
    How doth her faith superior show
    Beside the lust of losel man!
    See it, and change your music. Go
    Another way than once ye ran,
    Ye lyric libels, go, and vex
    The faithless found, the elder sex.’—(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)

another from the Medea:

    ‘It is men now that are crafty in counsel, and keep not their
    pledges by the gods; the scandal will turn and honour come to a
    woman’s life. ’Tis coming—respect for womankind. No longer will
    pestilent scandal attack women, and women alone. The music of
    ancient bards will die away, harping ever on woman’s perfidy.
    Phœbus is the guide of melody and in my heart he never set the
    wondrous music of his lyre. Else I would soon have raised a
    song that would have stayed the brood of male singers. The
    long years have many a tale to tell, of men as well as of
    women.’

This last sentence represents Euripides’ reasoned judgment on the
problems of feminism. Women are different from men, but they are not
inferior: all the arguments that are used to prove woman’s weakness could
be used equally well against men.

So we may leave the characters and turn now to the separate plays.

Of the complete dramas that we now possess, the Rhesus is probably
spurious, the Cyclops is a comic play, the Helena is a burlesque of the
tragic manner. Of the remaining sixteen, two, the Suppliant Women and
the Children of Heracles, are political plays, written to glorify Athens
as the champion of oppressed nationalities, and their interest is mainly
political. But nothing that Euripides wrote is altogether lacking in
vivid touches of feminism. In the Children of Heracles, for example,
there is one character who in a few words reveals the position of women
in Athenian life: ‘For a woman silence and discretion are best, and to
remain quiet within doors.’ So speaks the maiden Macaria before she
consents to a voluntary death. She has had bitter experience of life and
she is willing to die, for existence offers her no very pleasant prospect.

‘A friendless girl—’ she says ‘who will take me for his wife? Who will
have children by me? It is better for me to die.’ Her one pathetic desire
is to die, not on compulsion but as a willing sacrifice,—to escape from
life _nobly_ (the word recurs as often in Euripides as it does in Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler), to leave the ignoble servitude of woman’s lot. She begs
Iolaus to deal the death-blow and to cover her dead body. But Iolaus,
brave old man though he is, cannot bring himself to see her die, and
her last request is that at least she may die not among men, but in the
arms of women. These are her final words: ‘For my people I die. That
is my treasure in death: that I take instead of children and my virgin
bloom; if indeed anything exists below. I pray for my part that there be
_nothing_ there: if we mortals who must die shall find life’s business
in that land also, I know not where to turn. Death is counted the surest
potion against pain.’

A similar incident forms the most striking scene of the Suppliant Women.
Here it is not a young girl, but a married woman, Evadne, who of her own
accord goes to death. But her motive is much the same: ‘for the sake of a
noble repute I die,’ she cries ‘that I may surpass all women in generous
courage.’ Her husband is dead, she is a childless woman, and she refuses
to live on as a widow. Her father is anxious that she should nurse him
in his old age, but with strange perversity she prefers death and the
old man is left to make lament. ‘My daughter is dead;’ he cries, ‘she who
used to draw down my face to her lips and would hold my head fast in her
arms. Nothing is so sweet as a daughter when a father grows old. A son’s
life is a thing of greater importance, but sons are not so pleasant when
we need fond endearments.’

The main interest of the Suppliant Women is the same as that of
three other plays: the Phoenician Women, the Trojan Women, and the
Hecuba. They are concerned with war; but war, as seen from the woman’s
side, a thing of unredeemed and useless suffering. All the ‘glory of
conquest’ disappears: women and children are seen paying the price
of men’s ambition and pride. The Trojan Women is the most lamentable
and the most effective of the series. Written according to the oldest
formula of tragedy, the chorus are the chief persons in the action.
Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache are only particular representatives
of the sufferings which all the women in the play endure. The two male
characters, the lustful hypocrite Menelaus and the honest servant
Talthybius are of quite subordinate interest.

The play is an accumulation of sorrow upon sorrow, but the climax is the
murder of the little child Astyanax, a political crime, not inspired by
any of the human feelings of hatred and revenge, but coldly calculated
by men for the sake of future advantage. It is the women, the mother
and grandmother of the child, who have to suffer, that men may sleep in
safety. As Andromache bitterly says, she has always followed out the
whole duty of woman.

‘Those things that have been invented as virtuous pursuits for women, at
those I laboured ever in Hector’s house. To begin with—whether censure
should attach to women for it or not, I may not say—but at any rate, the
thing in itself brings a woman an evil name when she does not remain ever
within doors. So I put aside the desire for going out and stayed at home.
Moreover, I never admitted within our house the fantastic talk that some
females enjoy: I found my own sound sense the best teacher in domestic
matters, and made myself sufficing. A silent tongue and a quiet face—that
was what I rendered to my lord.’

And now she has her reward: she is to become a concubine in the house of
her husband’s murderer, and is told that one night in the arms of her new
lord will make her forget the past. As for her baby boy; ‘dear youngling
nestling in your mother’s arms, your skin so sweet and fragrant,’ he is
torn away and hurled down to death.

But Andromache is not worse treated than the other women. Hecuba is
handed over to Odysseus to be his slave, to sweep the floor and grind
the daily corn. The virgin Polyxena is reserved to be slain over the
tomb of Achilles; for it is not enough that living men should make women
their chattels; even the dead hero demands the tribute of a maiden’s
life. Cassandra has lived a vestal, dedicated to the service of the god,
and she too has her reward. The great king deigns to take her to his
bed, and in a scene of the grimmest irony the unhappy girl sings her own
marriage hymn. There is all the music of the hymeneal chorus, but we have
one solitary figure—the unwedded bride—instead of the joyful procession
of youths and maidens.

The Hecuba deals with the same events as the Trojan Women and in the
same spirit. The sacrifice of Polyxena is consummated and Hecuba
takes vengeance on one of her children’s murderers, the Thracian king
Polymnestor. Beguiled into the captive women’s tent he sees his own
children murdered and is then blinded. The scene where he comes reeling
out with blood-dripping eyes reaches the limits of the horrible, but
Euripides does not forget to draw the feminist moral.

‘If any one,’ the king says, ‘has spoken ill of women in the past, or is
now in the act of speaking or will some day speak, I will cut all his
words short—listen—Neither sea nor land breeds such a race as women are:
only the man who has to do with them from time to time knows what they
can do.’

The unhappy victim of a single woman forgets his logic and imputes the
fault of an individual to the sex. If the aggressor had been a man, his
thoughts would have been different and so the chorus tell him.

‘Be not over-fierce against us nor bring the feminine element into your
troubles. There is no need to blame all womankind.’

The particular note of realistic horror that marks the closing scenes
of the Hecuba appears in another group of four plays, the Iphigenia in
Tauris, the Heracles, the Orestes and the Electra. The first three have
been exhaustively studied by Dr. Verrall, and it is enough now to say
that the methods of criticism which Thucydides and Euripides use upon
the Trojan War, are here applied to other tales of the remote and heroic
past. Both writers—the historian and the dramatist—know that human nature
does not change, and they strip away remorselessly the glamour of ancient
legend. If such things happened, _this_ is how they happened, says
Euripides; and so we have the half-mad, half-heroic figure of Heracles:
the sinister Orestes always ready to unsheath his dagger: the ludicrous
yet pitiable Phrygian eunuch stuttering and trembling in panic fear,
and most terrible of all the unsexed woman Electra. Each play has its
own scene of horror, but the climax, perhaps, comes when Electra takes
the head of the murdered Ægisthus in both hands and pours forth all her
bitterness into the deaf ears.

The Hippolytus strikes an entirely different note, and is, perhaps,
the best known of all the plays. It has been adapted by Seneca and
Racine, used as material by Ovid and transposed into a romantic drama
by Professor Murray. But in spite of all this, Phædra’s position and
motives are often misunderstood. Hippolytus is her natural enemy and the
enemy of her children. The bastard son of Theseus, if his father died,
would probably oust the legitimate but younger children of the wife
from their father’s throne and himself seize the power. Phædra, a young
woman married to an old husband, is possessed by a physical desire for
the young man, but she struggles against her passion _for her children’s
sake_. When she finally gives up the struggle, she secures her children’s
safety by ensuring Hippolytus’ death or banishment. She knows Theseus
and she knows that he will bitterly resent any trespass on his property
and punish that trespass with all the severity in his power. The charge
is a false one, but it is only thus that her children’s future can be
protected.

The last two plays, the Bacchæ and the Iphigenia in Aulis, written in old
age and in exile at Macedonia, still deal with the double problem, the
sacrifice to God and the sacrifice to man; and they are constructed on
the same lines.

In the Bacchæ the men are of three sorts. There is the Adept—an imposter,
who has taken to religion as a trade; the old men Cadmus and Teiresias
who are ‘religious’ for social and family reasons: finally the young
Pentheus who is openly ‘irreligious’ and comes to a bad end.

The women alone _believe_: they are deceived by the adept, and much of
their belief is delusion, but it is a real spiritual benefit—to them. The
ritual of Bacchus was the one chance of escape in a Greek woman’s life
from the stifling seclusion of the harem home. For a few days at least
she became a free creature, allowed to roam at large upon the mountains.
The thyrsus of the god took the place of her master’s company: the sky
was her roof: the grass was her bed: she could put aside the wine press
and the flour mill and live on milk and honey. The ecstasy of such an
escape has never found more intense expression than in the narrative
speeches and the choric songs of the Bacchæ.

In the Iphigenia at Aulis the men again are of three types, foils
all and each to the idealism of Iphigenia and the practical sense of
Clytemnestra. Menelaus is the meanest: the slave of desire, ready for
any crime to gratify his passions. Agamemnon is the ordinary middle-aged
man, afraid of his wife and fond of his family, but capable of
deceiving the one and ruining the other. Achilles is the young man of
the governing classes, brought up to despise women, and to think that
every girl is anxious to become his wife. The men quarrel and plot for
their own selfish ends, but their schemes are detected by the keen wit of
Clytemnestra and rendered useless by the unselfish devotion of Iphigenia.




VIII.—EURIPIDES. THE FOUR FEMINIST PLAYS


The three main interests of Euripides’ mind, realist, pacificist and
feminist—to use our ugly jargon—are to be found in all his theatre; but
there are four plays which are especially concerned with the relations
between women and men, the Alcestis, Medea, Ion and Andromache. They are
not pleasant plays: indeed, to a lover of sentimental idealism they would
be conspicuously unpleasant if they were fully understood. Nor are they
to be recommended to women readers. The relations between the sexes are a
delicate thing; and human nature, male humanity at any rate, is generally
none the worse for discreet reticence and tender handling. But in these
plays Euripides uses the surgeon’s knife. They were meant for an audience
of men, grown callous by time and custom; and the treatment is ruthless.
They should be regarded as the painful but necessary operation, needed to
rid a patient of some long-festering ulcer, and the dramatist deserves
the thanks that we give to the skillful surgeon.

The particular flaws in the male character with which Euripides deals in
the four plays are these—meanness, cowardice, selfishness, and treachery.
They are not the faults, it will be noticed, that are especially
appropriate to a ruling class. Man is not indicted on the score of
haughtiness, pride or cruelty: his weaknesses are of a less ‘manly’ sort.
It is his position as the natural lord of creation that is questioned and
put to the test of dramatic action.

If Jason, Admetus, Apollo and Menelaus are _impossible_ characters,
then Euripides fails altogether in his lesson: if their actions, though
possible, are improbable, then again he fails in an artistic sense. Some
may think that no one could be quite so mean as Jason, quite so cowardly
and selfish as Apollo and Admetus, quite so treacherous as Menelaus; but
if we apply the test of experience, the cruel facts of life will justify
the poet. None of the four are ‘tragedies,’ in the sense in which we use
the word. They are as good examples as we are ever likely to see of ‘la
haute comédie’; the Ion and Andromache, perhaps, a little melodramatic,
the Alcestis and the Medea in places almost farcical; but all depending
eventually on a subtle study of psychology and social relationships.

It is probable that they were not originally composed for public
representation in the great theatre of Dionysus. They are intimate
studies of humanity and can quite easily be divested of the official
chorus, prologue and epilogue, which are independent of the dramatic
action of the play. What is left is Euripides’ own teaching, put as
plainly as the ironical spirit will allow. The frequency of translation
must not blind us to the fact that in essentials Euripides is
untranslatable. He is one of the greatest masters of irony and there is
nothing that is so apt to vanish in translation, or create confusion in
the English mind.

All four plays are concerned with problems of motherhood and children,
especially male children. In three, child-actors are required and play an
important part in the action: the fourth play, the Ion, has for its hero
a lad, just emerging from the ‘awkward age’ of boyhood.

Between the Ion and the Andromache there is a curious resemblance
of plot. The case was probably not uncommon in the circumstances of
race-degeneration that prevailed at Athens during the fifth century. In
both plays a husband has a childless wife, but a son by an irregular
union. There are two women to one man, and in each case there is another
man in the background, Apollo who has seduced Creüsa, and Orestes who has
been the affianced lover to Hermionë. The husbands, Xuthus and Pyrrhus,
are the least important figures in the action; indeed, Pyrrhus does not
appear in person at all. They are represented as colourless characters;
men of position and personal courage, dangerous, perhaps, when roused,
but generally negligible. Their young wives, Hermionë and Creüsa, regard
them with a mixture of contemptuous fear and jealous affection.

The interest is concentrated on the women, and the plays are studies
of wifely jealousy—‘Why should my husband have a child, while I am
childless?’—and maternal love.

Euripides knows well that motherhood is a woman’s natural sphere:
a childless woman is for him an abnormal woman, and behaves in an
abnormal and anti-social fashion. Both wives attribute their barrenness,
probably the natural result of their past history, to supernatural
causes. Hermionë believes that the foreign concubine Andromache has
bewitched her: Creüsa, that she has incurred the anger of a god. Hermionë
accordingly proposes to break the spell by killing the witch; Creüsa goes
to Delphi to propitiate the divinity and seek his aid.

Both women, also, in their jealous hate are anxious to kill their
husband’s bastard. Hermionë uses her father’s help and nearly succeeds
in murdering the boy Molossus. Creüsa employs her father’s old slave
as her agent, and all but poisons the boy Ion. In neither case is the
crime accomplished, for the plays are not ‘tragedies’; but the criminal
purpose is there. The women have been injured in the past and they are
childless. They are embittered against life and ready to requite evil for
evil. On the other hand, the unwedded mothers in both plays are ready
to sacrifice themselves for their children. Andromache offers her life
to save her son—‘What pleasure have I in life?’ she cries, ‘In him all
my hopes centre: it would be a disgrace for me not to die on behalf of
the child I bore. Children, indeed, are life: those who in ignorance
disparage them, may feel less pain than we do, but they are miserable in
their happiness.’

In the Ion Pythia consents to an even harder sacrifice: she hands over
her child to another woman, saves him thereby from the guilt of murder
and makes him prince of Athens. Andromache and the Priestess have been
injured in the past, but they are saved by their children: the maternal,
not the marital, is the holy state.

But in both plays the feminist interest is complicated by other motives,
political and religious. In the Andromache a bitter attack is made upon
the Spartan system in the person of Menelaus. ‘You a man?’ old Peleus
cries, ‘You dastard son of dastard parents. What claim have you to be
counted among men? A fine _man_ it was, a Phrygian, that robbed you of
your wife. You left your hearth and home without a lock, without a
servant to guard, as though, forsooth, you had a virtuous wife within
doors, she who was the worst of all women. Why, even if she wished, none
of your Spartan girls could be virtuous. They leave the shelter of home
and go about with young men; their legs bare, their dresses open; and
run and wrestle like men. It all seems to be abominable. We need not be
surprised that your system of education does not produce virtuous women.’

In the Ion the system of Delphi and the oracle is assailed, and a vein
of bitter irony runs through the play. So ironical is the poet’s method
that, if we take the prologue seriously and confine ourselves to the
statements there made, we are apt to get a somewhat misleading idea of
the play’s purpose. Dr. Way, for example, who gives the traditional
interpretation with the greatest clearness, supplies the following
summary of the action.

‘In the days when Erechtheus ruled over Athens, Apollo wrought violence
to the king’s young daughter Creüsa. And she, having borne a son, left
him, by reason of her fear and shame, in the cave wherein the God had
humbled her. But Apollo cared for him, and caused the babe to be brought
to Delphi, even to his temple. Therein was the child nurtured, and
ministered in the courts of the God’s house. And in process of time
Erechtheus died, and left no son nor daughter save Creüsa, and evil
days came upon Athens, that she was hard bestead in war. Then Xuthus, a
chief of the Achæan folk, fought for her and prevailed against her Eubœan
enemies, and for guerdon of victory received the princess Creüsa to wife,
and so became king-consort in Athens. But to these twain was no child
born; so, after many years, they journeyed to Delphi to inquire of the
oracle of Apollo touching issue. And there the God ordered all things
so that the lost was found, and an heir was given to the royal house of
Athens. Yet, through the blind haste of mortals, and their little faith,
was the son well-nigh slain by the mother, and the mother by the son.’

This summary quite faithfully represents the statements of the divine
Hermes; but Euripides knows as well as we do that gods do not walk the
earth and that children are not miraculously wafted through the air. The
prologue satisfies convention: the play itself is realistic and one of
the chief characters is a woman of whom the prologue tells us nothing.
The real plot, as opposed to the idealistic version, is as follows:—the
facts are put down crudely instead of being conveyed by subtle hints and
innuendo as they are in the Greek.

A young Athenian girl, Creüsa, wandering one day alone in the fields is
attacked by a brutal satyr. He drags her into a cave, violates her and
then makes his escape. She faints, and on awakening imagines that her
assailant, who has disappeared as suddenly as he came, was a being from
another world: she had seen him in the full sunlight; he is the sun-god
Apollo. She tells no one of her adventure, conceals her condition and
when her time comes, makes her way alone to the same cave. The child
is born, wrapped by the girl mother in a piece of cloth, and placed,
together with a golden bracelet as token, in a wicker basket. Then he is
abandoned, and of his fate we hear no more.

About the same time at Delphi, in one of those periods of promiscuous
sexual intercourse allowed and encouraged by temple ritual, one of the
Delphian women becomes a mother, by a roving soldier of fortune named
Xuthus. The latter leaves Delphi, ignorant of his paternity, and the
woman is soon after appointed priestess of the temple. Her child, Ion,
ostensibly a foundling, is reared within the temple precinct and regards
the priestess as his foster mother. Meanwhile, the soldier Xuthus makes
his way to Athens and marries Creüsa. They have no children, and come
to Delphi to ask advice of the oracle. The priestess recognises Xuthus
as the father of her son, and so arranges matters—remaining herself
unseen—that after a conversation with the boy he acknowledges him as his
child, the result of the former hasty connexion.

But though Xuthus has now got a son, Creüsa is still a childless wife. In
passionate anger she reveals her long hidden secret, denounces the god as
the author of her ruin, and with the help of a slave, attempts to poison
Ion. The plot fails, she is pursued as a murderess by Ion and is on the
point of being put to death. Then the priestess once more intervenes.
She has heard Creüsa’s story—in some details not unlike though more
lamentable than her own—and she determines to help a fellow sufferer.
She has already given up her son to his father, and she now arranges a
second trick whereby Creüsa shall believe Ion to be her child. She has in
her possession a baby’s wicker cradle, a piece of cloth similar to that
in which the dead baby was wrapped, and Creüsa’s own bracelet which has
been used in the poisoning plot. By an ingenious subterfuge she makes all
three appear to be the recognition tokens of Creüsa’s child. Creüsa with
joy, Ion with some painful doubts, accept the new relationship; and so
the play ends.

The Ion and the Andromache both abound in incident: the Medea and the
Alcestis depend more on a psychological interest. They are ‘one-part’
plays—the strong woman Medea and the weak man Admetus—and they have many
points of resemblance. In the Medea a mother kills her children to save
her own pride: in the Alcestis a mother consents to death to save her
children’s position. Alcestis is a saint: Medea—to some people—a devil.

Medea is certainly not meant to be a pleasant character. She has laboured
too long under a sense of injustice to be pleasant either in her thoughts
or behaviour. ‘You are always abusing the government;’ Jason says to
her, ‘and so you will have to be ejected.’ She expresses the revolt of
women in its bitterest form. ‘Of all things that draw breath,’ she cries,
‘and have understanding, we women are the most miserable; we are merely
_a thing that exists_. To begin with, we must outbid each other to buy
ourselves a lord and take a master of our body. ’Tis a risky business—we
may get a knave or an honest man. To leave her husband brings a woman
no honour, and we may not refuse our lords. When a woman comes to fresh
ways and pastures new, she needs must be a prophet, for she has never
been taught at home how best to use the man who now shares her bed. If
we work our task aright, and our lord keeps house with us, and does not
kick against the yoke, then our life is enviable. If not—better to be
dead. A man, if he is vexed with the company of his household, goes out
and purges away his heart’s annoyance; but we women are compelled to look
ever at one soul.’

This isolation was the worst feature in a Greek woman’s life: to a clever
woman it was soul-destroying, and Medea is incomparably cleverer than
any man in the play. The scenes where she forces the two old men, ‘King’
Creon and ‘King’ Ægeus to do, not what they want, but what she wants,
are masterpieces of satirical humour. With her husband her cleverness
fails her: she is too angry to reason: she hisses her scorn and foams her
disgust. Jason keeps cool and so far has the best of the argument.

‘You certainly are a clever woman,’ he says, ‘but you are only a woman. I
am a very fine figure of a man: you fell in love with me; and it was only
natural.’

Jason is in many ways like Admetus. Both are lovers of outward show and
have a great regard for men’s opinion. Both say with some emphasis that a
family of two children is quite large enough. Both have the same opinion
of women; and this is how Jason concludes—‘Men ought to be able to get
their children from some other source: the female sex should not exist:
and then there would be no trouble for mankind.’

Such sentiments naturally fail to please either the chorus or Medea.
The comment of the chorus is, ‘You have made the best of your case, but
still, surprising though it may seem to you, I think you are acting
unfairly in betraying the woman who has shared your bed.’ Medea gives
full vent to her anger: she contemptuously refuses the help in money
which Jason says he is ‘ready to give with an ungrudging hand,’ and at
last scornfully dismisses him—‘Be off with you. You are yearning for the
new girl you have broken in, all the time that you linger outside her
house. Go and play the bridegroom with her.’

But in the next scene Medea has mastered her temper and pretends to
submit. ‘We are but what we are,’ she says, ‘just women. You must not
take pattern by the evil nor answer folly with foolishness. I give way: I
acknowledge that I was wrong.’ Jason is patronising and friendly in his
answer: ‘I approve your present attitude, and, indeed, I do not blame
your past behaviour: it is only to be expected: woman is a thing of
moods.’ He consents to ask his new wife for a remission of the children’s
exile. ‘Certainly I will, and I fancy that I shall persuade her.’ ‘Yes,
indeed, you will,’ Medea says, ‘if she is one of us: all women are alike.
But I will help you once again in this enterprise, too.’ And as in the
past she had given him an antidote against the fire-breathing bulls, so
now she gives him the fiery robe which is to destroy the young bride.

Then comes the crucial scene of the play: Medea kills her children and
we are faced by the problem—when is killing murder?

A mother who kills her child is to us a dreadful figure, and the death
penalty is invoked against the deserted girl-mother: no punishment is
inflicted upon the father, perhaps because no punishment can be adequate.
Greek law and custom went further and in a different direction. The
father was allowed to decide whether the child whom his wife had brought
forth should be reared. Child killing in this fashion, when done by the
father, was not a crime, and the exposure of children after birth was a
common, and by no means held to be a reprehensible act. Plato, indeed,
thinks it a fit subject for a jest in the Theætetus (p. 161). ‘Do you
think,’ says Socrates, ‘that it is right in all cases to rear your own
child? Will you be very angry if we take it—the argument—from you, as we
might take a baby from a young mother with her first child?’ ‘Oh, no,’
answers the other. ‘Theætetus will not mind: he is not at all hard to get
on with.’

The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether
she minded or not, decision lay with the father—as we see in Terence’s
play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, ‘You
remember, don’t you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that
if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.’ The child
proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of.
Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their
birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and Œdipus, they were not
often exposed.

There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is
the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your
own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a
man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were
not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. ‘They say of
us,’ cries Medea, ‘that we live a life free from danger within doors,
while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools.
Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear
one child.’ A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child
to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that
child’s life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of
marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right
that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession
of the securities?

Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest.
It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother
to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural and criminal for a
father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction
and without blame.

The Medea then is realistic and little else: the Alcestis, the first
in time of Euripides’ plays, is a blend of style, and demands a fuller
treatment.

There are no villains in the Alcestis, and there are no heroes. There
is one heroic character, but her heroism is of so common a type that it
usually passes unnoticed. The three men, Admetus, Pheres and Heracles,
in varying degrees are animated by the strongest of all male motives,
self-preservation. Alcestis lacks their sound common-sense; she is guided
by passion, by the strongest of all female passions and that which comes
nearest to the divine, the maternal passion of self-sacrifice. She has
given life once, she is prepared to give it again.

It is commonly assumed—and even Verrall tacitly allows this to go
unchallenged—that Alcestis ‘is in love with’ Admetus, and Admetus ‘is in
love with’ Alcestis. The affection which, happily for us, may usually be
expected to exist between husband and wife, is taken for granted in the
very different conditions of Euripides’ time.

Now, as we have seen, this is a cardinal error. Mutual affection and
esteem did _not_ reign in an ordinary Athenian household. Husband and
wife were usually indifferent one to another, and even this indifference
was an improvement upon the Ionian relationship when husband and wife
were often natural enemies.

That a wife should give up her life out of love for her husband is a
state of things so agreeable to the natural man that it is, perhaps,
not surprising if the language of the play has never been too closely
examined.

_Alcestis’ motive is not love for her husband, but love for her
children._ Euripides, following Æschylus, knew that maternal love is a
far stronger force than conjugal affection, even when the latter exists.
The mother and the children—on them he spends all the resources of his
unrivalled pathos—the husband is a mark for his bitterest irony. It is
because Alcestis does not wish her children to be left _fatherless_ that
she consents to death.

The position of the widow—as indeed, is implied in our language by the
form of the word—is definitely worse than that of the widower. The
orphan in ancient times was the fatherless child, and the position of
the chief’s son whose father died in his childhood was particularly
unenviable. It is described in two of the most pathetic passages in Greek
literature, by Andromache in the twenty-second book of the Iliad and by
Tecmessa, in the most Euripidean of all the plays of Sophocles, the
Ajax. Under the old tribal system, a chief’s power depended very largely
on personal ascendency, so that old men like Laertes and Pheres found it
expedient to retire in favour of their grown-up son. A small boy like
Eumelus could not have maintained his father’s position, and his father’s
death would probably have meant considerable danger to his life. All this
in Euripides’ time was a commonplace and needed no emphasis. He prefers,
indeed, to deal with the reverse picture—the sorrows of the motherless
children and especially of the motherless girl; for the pathos of the
sacrifice is partly this. It is for the sake of the boy and his future
position in life, and not so much for the girl, that the mother dies.

Let us now examine the play itself. Admetus, chief of Pheræ, has been
told by his medicine man that he is a very bad life: that, indeed, he
cannot hope to live much longer—three months, perhaps; six months, say,
at the most. But he has been a generous benefactor to the profession,
and in particular has rendered some quite exceptional services to the
arch-physician, Apollo himself. Accordingly a special provision is made
in his case. If he can get some one of his own family to transfer to him
their vitality, the operation may be feasible. The problem is, to find
the man—or woman—for his family is very small. Admetus goes to his father
and his mother, but both, even his mother, refuse; for, as we shall see,
Admetus is not a very sympathetic character, or likely to arouse the
spirit of self-sacrifice even in a mother’s heart. Finally he asks his
young wife, the mother of his two little children, and she consents.

At this point the play opens. Admetus believes what he is told; Alcestis
believes what she is told: the sixth month is ending and she is marked
out for death. So Death appears, and the burlesque dialogue between
Death and the Doctor, Thanatos and Apollo, forms the prologue, where the
arch-physician, who can cure all diseases but one, is confronted by that
One himself. But the prologue and the entrance of the chorus need not
detain us. The first intimate details about Alcestis are given by the
servant woman in her long speech to the chorus, and it will be noticed
that in the picture of the household which she draws for them the central
point is the marriage bed. Twice already has Alcestis risked her life
upon that bed, and now another sacrifice has to be made. A childless
woman might refuse. Her husband demands her life, and she must give it
for the sake of the children whom on that bed she has borne. It is of her
children that Alcestis thinks: for them she prays: she has no petition to
make on her husband’s behalf. In all the narrative, indeed, the husband
scarcely appears. The chorus—_of men_—notice the omission and enquire of
him, and this is the answer they get:

‘_Oh, yes he is weeping_ as he holds the woman he loves, his bed-fellow,
in both arms. He is begging her not to abandon him: _he wants what he
cannot have_.’

The chorus then burst into a lament which is interrupted by the
appearance of Alcestis and her husband outside the house. The following
scene is an extreme example of that combination of pathos and irony from
which Euripides never shrinks. The lamentation of Alcestis, expressed in
lyrics of the purest quality, is answered at regular intervals by Admetus
in iambic couplets where style and thought alike are cruelly commonplace.

Then Alcestis who has been standing, supported by her women, sinks to the
ground and with one last cry _to her children_ thrice repeated seems to
faint away. Admetus in the name _of the children_ begs her not to forsake
him ‘this is worse _for me_ than any death: on you we all depend—to
live or die.’ Alcestis makes her final effort, and for the first time
addresses her husband by name, but in the pathetic speech that follows,
her last words are for her children, and it is plain that she is terribly
afraid that Admetus will marry again and inflict a stepmother upon them.
Admetus himself hesitates to give the promise, and it is one of the
chorus who answers the dying wife.

With Alcestis disappears the pathos of the play. The rest is ironical,
a realistic criticism of the resurrection story and hardly concerns us.
But the scene between Pheres and Admetus where the old father—the mother
is prudently omitted from the action,—comes to convey his sympathy, is
a beautiful illustration of Euripides’ insight into the weakness of the
male character.

‘Such are the pair, father and son: behold your ordinary sensual man,’
he seems to say. Dr. Verrall spends some time and pains in showing that
Admetus is not a hero, and, doubtless, he is not heroic either to us or
to Euripides. But it does not follow that an Athenian audience would
share our or the master’s private views. We are unconsciously influenced
by centuries of romantic literature in which the relations of the sexes
have been idealised. The Athenians treated women much as the baser sort
still treat animals. To us Admetus seems almost inconceivably selfish and
callous: probably many an Athenian never realised that his conduct was
reprehensible.

Even so to-day a vegetarian has considerable difficulty in proving to
the ordinary man that it is unjustifiable selfishness to take life for
the gratification of appetite. ‘I always have eaten meat,’ such an one
will say; ‘I always shall: and so did my father. Animals were created for
use.’ The Athenian might have used the same language about his wife.

But in the play itself no one is under any sort of delusion as to
Admetus. The servant woman, the attendant, the chorus, Alcestis
herself: all know him for what he is, a selfish coward. Very religious
certainly he is and very hospitable: in other words, very full of
absurd superstitions and very fond of having strangers in the house to
divert him from himself. Heracles the ravisher, and Apollo the seducer,
appreciate him as an excellent boon companion: his own household do not
share their views. They know too well—and there is constant reference
to this in the play—that he is ‘foolish’ in the Euripidean sense of the
word, the slave of passions which he is unable to control. And so we may
leave him: in his character Euripides explodes the fallacy that in all
cases and in all circumstances man is the superior animal.

But the wonder of the Alcestis is this: in spite of the irony and cruel
satire, in spite of the bitter criticism of the two doctrines, the
existence of the supernatural and the superiority of man, there remain
so many other threads of interest—realism and romance, pathos and
humour—that a well-disposed reader can shut his eyes to the unpleasant,
and usually does. What is wanted to bring out the full meaning of
Euripides’ plays is a double translation; one version written in prose
by a realist with a taste for irony, the other composed by a lyric poet.
Neither version will be satisfactory apart, for the spirit of Euripides
is a compound of the two: neither will be final, for translations quickly
age and Euripides is ever young.




IX.—THE SOCRATIC CIRCLE


Sophocles is almost the last representative of the earlier and happier
period of the Athenian Empire, their golden age as it seemed later, when
to the complacent imagination of the male citizen all things seemed to
be working together in the direction of progress and freedom. Progress
indeed there was, and for men freedom of thought, for the intellectual
atmosphere of Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C., with its
combination of clear knowledge and bracing speculation, has never been
surpassed. But as a society, Athens already contained within herself
the seeds of decay and destruction. The wealth of her intellectual
achievement barely concealed the poverty of her social morality, and it
was only by dint of firmly closing their eyes to the degradation of their
women and the misery of their slaves that the Athenians maintained for a
time the fond illusion that everything was for the best in the best of
all possible cities.

Then came the shock of the Peloponnesian War and the inherent weaknesses
of a free State which refuses political freedom to more than half its
population were cruelly revealed. For nearly thirty years, with some
few breathing spaces, the struggle went on, while Athens tried to force
a culture intellectually superior but morally inferior to that of many
other of the Greek peoples upon a reluctant world: and in the end she
failed and fell.

After the fifth century the political importance of Athens disappears;
her intellectual pre-eminence is saved for her by a small group of men
who under the hard teaching of war discerned the flaws of her social
system and set themselves resolutely to the task of criticism and reform.
The nobility of war, the nobility of birth, the nobility of sex: these
are some of the prejudged questions that the Socratic Circle ventured
to dispute, and their contentions, as we have them recorded in the
literature of the late fifth and the early fourth centuries, form perhaps
the most valuable legacy that the Greek mind has left us. But, like so
much of Greek thought, their ideas require interpretation for a modern
reader. Some of the greatest of the Circle, Socrates and Antisthenes,
for example, we only know in the writings of other men, and we have
to disentangle the master’s ideas from those of his disciples. Plato
and Xenophon were drawn away by metaphysics and soldiering, and social
problems form only a part of their interests. Euripides and Aristophanes
were compelled to conform to the conventions of Attic tragedy and comedy,
and we must always discount the influence of the stage; Euripides is
often less and Aristophanes more serious than suits our ideas of a tragic
and a comic writer. Lastly, for all the group except Xenophon, irony was
the favourite weapon of attack, an irony so deftly veiled that it made
the bitterest criticism possible, and still often passes undetected.

But even so the critics were not popular and their reforms were not
accepted: Socrates was put to death; Plato found a shelter in political
obscurity; Euripides, like Æschylus, passed much of his life away from
Athens; Xenophon took up his home in the Peloponnese: in their lives they
fought against a stubborn majority, and when they were dead the social
organisation of Athenian life remained apparently unchanged. But their
teaching lived on after them, and on feminist questions it derives almost
an additional value from the general hostility of their fellow-countrymen.

In their criticism of the problems that we call feminism Euripides
and Socrates were the initiative forces, and a close study of the
former’s plays is indispensable for any one who wishes to understand the
position of women in Athenian life. But the plays of Euripides throw
also a certain light on the position of Socrates himself. Socrates and
Euripides we know were close friends: ‘which of the two gathered the
sticks and which made the faggot,’ so runs the ancient saying, ‘no man
can tell,’ and in many points of family relationship they had the same
experience. Euripides’ mother, Cleito ‘the greengrocer,’ Socrates’ wife,
Xanthippë ‘the scold,’ are two of the rare women in Athenian history of
whom we know even the names. Both men were lovers of women in the nobler
sense, and the later misogynists revenged themselves by enlarging upon
their marital infelicities. In the case of Euripides there is no real
evidence to support these scandals, and even if Xanthippë was a woman
of strong temper, both men were well enough satisfied with the married
state to take another wife in addition to their first helpmate, when a
special law, rendered necessary by the waste of male lives in the great
war, gave formal sanction to such a step. Both alike agreed in condemning
the misogyny of their day and knew that a man who habitually thinks ill
of women has probably no very good reason to think well of himself.
Both applied to women as well as to men the great doctrines of liberty,
equality, fraternity.

Euripides saw in woman the equal and not the slave of man, Socrates
regarded her as his natural friend and not his natural enemy. In
Xenophon’s Socratic books, the _Memorabilia_, the _Œconomicus_, and
the _Symposium_, we get the best record of the master’s view of the
women, for Socrates was himself too cautious ever to commit himself to
the written word, and perhaps the most characteristic of the episodes
is the visit to the fair hetaira, the one faithful of all the lovers of
Alcibiades, described in the _Memorabilia_.

    There lived in Athens a fair lady called Theodotë, whose
    habit it was to give her society to any one who could woo and
    win her. One of the company made mention of her to Socrates,
    remarking that the lady’s beauty quite surpassed description.
    ‘Painters,’ said he, ‘go to her house to paint her portrait,
    and she displays to them all her perfection!’ ‘Well,’ said
    Socrates, ‘manifestly, we too must go and see her. It is
    impossible from mere hearsay to realise something which
    surpasses description.’ Thereupon his informant: ‘Quick, then,
    and follow me.’

    So off they went at once to Theodotë, and found her at home,
    posing to a painter. When the painter had finished, ‘Friends,’
    said Socrates, ‘ought we to be more grateful to Theodotë for
    displaying to us her beauty, or she to us for having come
    to see her? I suppose if this display is going to be more
    advantageous to her, she ought to be grateful to us. But if
    it is we who are going to make a profit from the sight, then
    we ought to be grateful to her.’ ‘Very fairly put,’ said one,
    and Socrates resumed, ‘The lady is profiting this moment by
    the praise she receives from us, and when we spread the tale
    abroad she will gain a further advantage. But, as for ourselves
    we are beginning to have a desire to touch what we have just
    now seen: when we are going away we shall feel the smart, and
    after we have gone we shall still long for her. So we may
    reasonably say that it is we who are the servitors, and that
    she accepts our service.’ Thereupon Theodotë: ‘Well, if that
    is so, it would be only proper for me to thank you for coming
    to see me.’ Afterwards Socrates noticed that the lady herself
    was expensively arrayed, and that her mother’s dress (for
    her mother was in the room) and general appearance was by no
    means humble. There were a number of comely maidens also in
    attendance, showing little signs of neglect in their attire,
    and in all respects the household was luxuriously arranged.

    ‘Tell me, Theodotë,’ said he, ‘have you any land of your own?’

    ‘I have not,’ she replied.

    ‘Well, then, I suppose your household brings you in a good
    income.’

    ‘No, I have not a house.’

    ‘Have you a factory, then?’

    ‘No, not a factory either.’

    ‘How then do you get what you need?’

    ‘When I find a friend, and he is kind enough to help me, then
    my livelihood is assured.’

    ‘By our lady, that is a fine thing to have. A flock of friends
    is far better than a flock of sheep, or goats, or oxen. But do
    you leave it to chance whether friends are to wing their way
    towards you like flies, or do you use some mechanical device?’

    ‘Why, how could I find any device in this matter?’

    ‘Surely, it would be much more appropriate for you than for
    spiders. You know how they hunt for their living. They weave
    gossamer webs, I believe, and anything that comes their way
    they take for food.’

    ‘Do you advise me, then, to weave a hunting net?’

    ‘No, no. You must not suppose that it is such a simple matter
    to catch that noble animal, a lover. Have you not noticed
    that even to catch such a humble thing as a hare people use
    many devices? Knowing that hares are night-feeders, they
    provide themselves with night-dogs, and use them in the
    chase. Furthermore, as the creatures run off at daybreak,
    they get other dogs to scent them out and find which way they
    go from their feeding ground to their forms. Again, they are
    swift-footed, so that they can get away in an open race, and a
    third class of dogs is provided to catch them in their tracks.
    Lastly, inasmuch as some escape even from the dogs, men set
    nets in their runs, so that they may fall into the meshes and
    be caught.’

    ‘But what sort of contrivance should I use in hunting for
    lovers?’

    ‘A man, of course, to take the place of the dog; some one able
    to track out and discover wealthy amateurs for you; able also
    to find ways of getting them into your nets.’

    ‘Nets, forsooth! What sort of nets have I?’

    ‘One you have certainly, close enfolding and well constructed,
    your body. And within your body there is your heart, which
    teaches you the looks that charm and the words that please. It
    tells you to welcome true friends with a smile, and to lock out
    overbearing gallants; when your beloved is sick, to tend him
    with anxious care; when he is prospering, to share his joy;
    in fine, to surrender all your soul to a devout lover. I am
    sure you know full well how to love. Love needs a tender heart
    as well as soft arms. I am sure, too, that you convince your
    lovers of your affection not by mere phrases, but by acts of
    love.’

    ‘Nay, nay, I do not use any artificial devices.’

    ‘Well, it makes a great difference if you approach a man in
    the natural and proper way. You will not catch or keep a lover
    by force. He is a creature who can only be captured and kept
    constant by kindness and pleasure.’

    ‘That is true.’

    ‘You should only ask then of your well-wishers such services as
    will cost them little to render, and you should requite them
    with favours of the same sort. Thereby you will secure their
    fervent and constant love, and they will be your benefactors
    indeed. You will charm them most if you never surrender except
    when they are sharp set. You have noticed that the daintiest
    fare, if served before a man wants it, is apt to seem insipid;
    while, if he is already sated, it even produces a feeling
    of nausea. Create a feeling of hunger before you serve your
    banquet; then even humble food will appear sweet.’

    ‘How can I create this hunger in my friends?’

    ‘First, never serve them when they are sated. Never suggest it
    even. Wait until the feeling of repletion has quite disappeared
    and they begin again to be sharp set. Even then at first let
    your suggestions be only of most modest conversation. Seem not
    to wish to yield. Fly from them—and fly again; until they feel
    the pinch of hunger. That is your moment. The gift is the same
    as when a man desired it not; but wondrous different now its
    value.’

    Theodotë: ‘Why do you not join me in the hunt, and help me to
    catch lovers?’

    ‘I will, certainly,’ said he, ‘if you can persuade me to come.’

    ‘Nay, how can I do that?’

    ‘You must look yourself, and find a way if you want me.’

    ‘Come to my house, then, often.’

    Then Socrates, jesting at his own indifference to business,
    replied:

    ‘It is no easy matter for me to take a holiday. I am always
    kept busy by my private and public work. Moreover, I have my
    lady friends, who will never let me leave them night or day.
    They would always be having me teach them love-charms and
    incantations.’

    ‘What, do you know that, too?’

    ‘Why, what else is the reason, think you, that Apollodorus and
    Antisthenes never leave my side? Why have Cebes and Simmias
    come all the way from Thebes to stay with me? You may be quite
    sure that not without love-charms and incantations and magic
    wheels may this be brought about.’

    ‘Lend me your wheel, then, that I may use it on you.’

    ‘Nay, I do not want to be drawn to you. I want you to come to
    me.’

    ‘Well, I will come. But be sure and be at home.’

    ‘I will be at home to you, unless there be some lady with me
    who is dearer even than yourself.’

It is a significant incident, charmingly related by Xenophon, but not
altogether charming in itself, although the humorous irony of Socrates
may hide from careless readers all the darker sides of the picture. But
Socrates himself is entirely lovable. There is nothing furtive, nothing
patronising in the philosopher’s attitude. He behaves to Theodotë as he
would behave to every one. He admires her beauty, and, like Goldsmith,
recognises that a beautiful woman is a benefactress to mankind. But while
he knows the strength of her position, he realises its weakness also,
and there is a shade of pity in his admiration.

A similar appreciation of women is shown in many passages of the
_Symposium_; for example, when Socrates says, ‘Women need no perfume:
they are compounds themselves of fragrance.’ There is that Socratic
paradox, also, after the dancing-girl’s performance:

    ‘This is one proof, among very many, that woman’s nature is in
    no way inferior to man’s: she has no lack either of judgment or
    physical strength.’

He continues his argument by advising his friends to _teach_ their wives;
and he deals with the weakest point in woman’s life—the ignorance in
which they were kept. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he says; ‘teach her all that
you would wish your companion to know.’

Thereupon Anthisthenes puts the pertinent question: ‘If that is your
idea, Socrates, why do you not try and train Xanthippë, who is, I
believe, the most difficult of all wives, present, past, and future?’ To
this he gets the following reply:

    ‘I have noticed,’ says Socrates, ‘that people who wish to
    become good horsemen get a spirited horse, not a tame, docile
    animal. They think that if they can manage a fiery steed they
    will find no difficulty with an ordinary horse. My case is the
    same. I wanted to be a citizen of the world and to mix with all
    men. So I took her. I am quite sure that if I can endure her,
    I shall find no difficulty in ordinary company.’

Thus Socrates draws benefit even from a shrewish wife. His ideas of
a happy marriage, and the best means of securing that happiness, are
set out for us by Xenophon in the _Œconomicus_. Ischomachus, Socrates’
interlocutor, is for all practical purposes Xenophon himself, and the
whole passage should be compared with those delightful stories of
conjugal happiness—the tale of Panthea, and the wife of Tigranes—which
the historian gives us in the Education of Cyrus. The dialogue begins
by Socrates asking Ischomachus how he won his sobriquet of ‘honest
gentleman’—surely not by staying at home!

    ‘No,’ replies Ischomachus, ‘I do not spend my days indoors:
    my wife is quite capable of managing our household without my
    help.’

    ‘Ah, that is what I want to know. Did you train your wife
    yourself to be all that a wife should be? Or, when you took her
    from her parents, did she possess enough knowledge to perform
    her share of house management?’

    ‘Possess knowledge when I took her? Why, she was not fifteen
    years old, and until then she had lived under careful
    surveillance—to see and hear, and ask as little as possible.
    All that she knew was how to take wool and turn it into a
    dress. All that she had seen was how the spinning-women have
    their daily tasks assigned. As regards control of appetite,
    she had certainly received a sound education, and that, I
    think, is all-important.’

Ischomachus then proceeds to detail his system of education. It begins
with husband and wife offering sacrifice together and praying that
fortune may aid in teaching and learning what is best for both. Then, as
soon as the wife ‘is tamed to the hand, and not too frightened to take
part in conversation,’ the husband explains that they are now partners
together, at present in the house, in future in any children that may
be born to them. They have each contributed a portion to the common
stock, and must now work together in protecting their joint interests.
The wife agrees to this, but doubts her own capacity. ‘Everything
depends on you,’ she says; ‘my business, mother said, was to be modest
and temperate.’ The husband then explains the true functions of man
and woman and their points of difference. Man has a greater capacity
than woman for enduring heat and cold, wayfaring and route-marching.
God meant for him outdoor work. Woman has less capacity for bearing
fatigue; she is more affectionate, more timorous. God has imposed upon
her the indoor work. Finally, to men and women alike in equal measure,
God gives memory, carefulness, and self-control. Custom agrees with the
divine ordinance. For a woman to stay quiet at home, instead of roaming
abroad, is no disgrace: for a man to remain indoors is discreditable.
The wife is like the queen bee, on whom all the work of the hive depends;
and a good mistress soon wins the loyal love of all her servants. So
the conversation proceeds, and with this beautiful sentence the first
conjugal lesson ends:

    ‘But your sweetest joy will be to show yourself my superior,
    and to make me your servant; then you need not fear that as
    the years roll on you will lose your place of honour in the
    house; you will be sure that, though you are no longer young,
    your honour will increase; even as you become a better partner
    to myself and the children, and a better guardian of the home;
    for it is not beauty, but virtue, that nurtures the growth of a
    good name.’

But Ischomachus does not confine his teaching to words. He explains to
Socrates how once he asked his wife for some household article which she
could not find, and how deeply she blushed at her heedless ignorance. So
he gives her a practical lesson in household management by taking her
over the house and explaining the uses of the various rooms and different
utensils, expatiating the while on the beauty of order—‘for a beauty like
the cadence of sweet music dwells even in pots and pans set out in neat
array.’ His wife profits by the lesson, and henceforth everything is in
its proper place.

He deals faithfully, too, with that most pardonable of woman’s
weaknesses, the desire to please, that leads some ladies to attempt to
improve upon nature. So when one day he finds his wife with powder and
rouge upon her cheeks, and wearing high-heeled shoes, he begins like this:

    ‘Dear wife, would you think me a good partner in our business
    if I were to make a display of unreal wealth, false money, and
    sham purples, wood coated with gold?’

    ‘Nay, surely not,’ she replies.

    ‘And as regards my body, would you hold me as more lovable if I
    were to anoint myself with pigments and paint my eyes?’

    ‘Nay, I would rather look into your eyes and see them bright
    with health.’

    ‘Believe me, then, dear wife, I am not better pleased with this
    white powder and red paint than I should be with your natural
    hue.’

So after that day the young wife gives up cosmetics, and on her
husband’s advice takes healthy exercise instead; the physical training
he recommends being ‘to knead the dough and roll the paste; to shake the
coverlets and make the beds.’

With one last anecdote we must end. Socrates asks his friend whether
beside his practical wisdom he has any rhetorical and judicial skill.

    ‘Of course I have,’ says Ischomachus. ‘I am always hearing and
    debating cases in my own household. Yes, and before to-day I
    have been taken on one side, and have had to stand my trial, to
    see what punishment I should bear and what fine I should pay.’

    ‘And how do you get on?’ says Socrates.

    ‘When I have the advantage of truth on my side, well enough;
    but when I have not truth with me I can never make the worse
    cause appear the better.’

    ‘And how is that? Who is the judge?’

    ‘_My wife._’

Ischomachus’ home, at least, is no doll’s-house. His wife is as far
removed from the humble drudge with whom the ordinary Athenian was
familiar as she is from the painted odalisque who to the Ionian was the
ideal of the perfect woman.




X.—ARISTOPHANES


The work of Aristophanes is a pendant to that of Euripides, and is often
inspired by a much more serious purpose than is commonly supposed.
Aristophanes is no mere vulgar buffoon, and most of his obscenity is an
empty parade made necessary by the conditions of the Attic stage which
Aristophanes himself in the course of his career rendered obsolete. He
was a member of the Socratic Circle (the famous Symposium ends with
Socrates expounding to Agathon and Aristophanes the nature of tragedy
and comedy, and explaining the essential similarity of their functions),
and in his early manhood he fell under the spell of the great tragedian.
Of all his comedies there is hardly one which in language, music, and
dramatic technique does not reveal the intimate harmony that exists
between the two men. Aristophanes and Euripides, like our Shelley,
were born to be lyric poets, and they both possess the divine gift of
melody. But they were interested in so many other things, in politics, in
feminism, and in social reform, that art with them often takes the second
place. As men they are incomparably greater than such self-centred
poets as Sophocles; as artists they neither aim at nor achieve his
academic perfection. Their methods are curiously alike, and it is because
Aristophanes knows Euripides so well, and is in such intimate sympathy
with him, that the constant parody of the Euripidean style in the
comedies never becomes wearisome.

Parody, gross humour, indecency even, these were the qualities that a
comic poet at Athens had necessarily to display, and Aristophanes, having
chosen his medium of expression, is compelled to obey the restrictions
of the comic stage. Moreover, it is obvious that he enjoys indulging his
humour to the utmost. The wit of Euripides is restrained and ironical,
with something of the bitterness of old age; Aristophanes in most of his
plays has the exuberance of youthful spirits and an overflowing stock of
fantastic inventions.

But a dramatist, even a comic dramatist, however fantastic and inventive
his humour may be, must have some foundation of serious purpose, and that
foundation Aristophanes takes very largely from Euripides. His three
chief themes are the same as those of the tragedian: firstly, that war
is a curse—it is useful perhaps for politicians and soldiers, but only
brings disaster to real workers; secondly, that a belief in gods made
in mortal shape is absurd—such a belief will certainly lead to farcical
situations, which if treated realistically will be excellent material
for a comic poet; thirdly, that women are as capable, intellectually and
morally, as men—their experience of house-management especially fits them
for carrying on the business of a State, and a feminist administration
might solve many problems that have proved too hard for men. The first of
these themes appears in the plot of the _Acharnians_, the _Peace_, and
the _Knights_; the second in the _Birds_, the _Frogs_, and the _Plutus_;
the feminist plays are the _Women at the Festival_, the _Lysistrata_, and
the _Women in Assembly_.

It is obvious that the treatment of these themes in tragedy and comedy
will be different; but the initial point of view is very much the same.
As for the abuse of Euripides, and there is plenty in the comedies, it is
merely part of the comic game, and it is foolish to take it seriously.
Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, and Socrates were all close friends, as
intimate one with the other as are our leading politicians, and to speak
of Aristophanes ‘attacking’ Euripides and Socrates is to misread the
situation.

It is not to be supposed that all the members of the Socratic Circle
thought alike on all subjects, and even as regards feminism there are
some points of difference between Euripides and Aristophanes. The
comic poet is rather interested in the woman’s cause than devoted to
it, and in many of his plays he certainly hesitates between the gross
realism of the phallic god and the new ideas of feminist doctrine.
Often, too, in his theatre women occupy as insignificant a place as
they did in the actual life of his time. In the _Wasps_, for example,
Philocleon’s household apparently consists of his grown-up son and the
attendant slaves: nothing is said of wife or daughter. In the _Knights_,
‘Demos’—John Bull—has no Mrs. Bull to keep him company: his domestic
arrangements are in the hands of men slaves. In the _Clouds_ there is
a vivid picture of Socrates at home: house, furniture, and pupils are
all described, but nothing of Xanthippë. So in the _Acharnians_ and the
_Peace_ we have household scenes, but no women take part in the action:
the women are there, but they are persons of no importance. Trygæus,
before setting off on his adventurous voyage, bids an affectionate
farewell to his little children, but for his wife he has no message. The
Megarian sells his two daughters for a handful of leeks and a measure of
salt, and then prays to all his saints that he may be lucky enough to get
as good a price for his mother and his wife.

A realist, depicting life at Athens in the fifth century, was compelled
to give women an insignificant rôle, but even in this group of plays
Aristophanes makes one exception, the exception, perhaps, that proves the
rule, for even under the harem system the masterful woman will sometimes
come to the front, and Haroun al Raschid goes in fear of Zobeida. In
the _Clouds_, Strepsiades is married and by no means independent of his
wife: the lady is mentioned, although she takes no part in the play,
and the reasons of this difference are instructive. Strepsiades himself
is a person of inferior social position, lacking both in will-power
and intellectual force; his wife is a woman of property, the daughter
of a noble family and herself of determined character. Using all these
advantages, she is just able to hold her own with her feeble, foolish
husband, and to insist at least on a compromise when their opinions
differ.

But it is possible to make too much of the absence of women characters,
for the conditions of performance at the Lenæan festival were all against
feminine interests, and even though the plot of many of the comedies
has little to do with women, there are constant flashes that reveal the
author’s feminist sympathies. Of all the episodes in the _Birds_ there is
none quite so freshly humorous as the arrest of Iris, the girl messenger
of the Gods, and even in the midst of the fierce political raillery of
the _Knights_ there comes the delicious interlude of the lady triremes
meeting in council; the old stager Nauphantë, addressing the assembly
first and revealing the goings-on of the Government, followed by the shy
young thing ‘who has never come near men,’ and is determined to keep her
independence, ‘heaven forfend, no man shall ever be my master.’ Indeed,
considering the state of Athens and the necessity that lay upon a comic
poet of suiting the tastes of his audience, the real surprise is that
no less than three of the remaining eleven plays—the _Lysistrata_, the
_Women at the Festival_, and the _Women in Assembly_—should be concerned
with the feminist movement and be written in open advocacy of the women’s
cause.

The Women at the Festival—_Thesmophoriazusæ_—is the lightest of the
three, and is really a very brilliantly written feminist ‘revue.’
Euripides is the ‘compare,’ and in various disguises takes part in most
of the incidents. He has heard that the women, now assembled in their own
festival to which no men are admitted, intend to have him put to death,
firstly for being a playwright and secondly as a slanderer of womenkind.
He goes round to his friends to save him (the scene is a parody on the
_Alcestis_), and first of all to his fellow-dramatist, Agathon. But
Agathon, whose music is then burlesqued, is too much like a woman to be
of any assistance. He is another of the inner Socratic Circle, but in the
way of jest the most infamous conduct is imputed to him: his appearance
is as ambiguous as his morals, and all he can do for Euripides is to
lend him some articles of women’s dress for the purpose of a disguise.
So Euripides has to fall back on his father-in-law, Mnesilochus, the
buffoon of the piece, and there follows one of those scenes of disrobing
with which we are familiar on the modern stage. The old gentleman is
undressed, shaved all over and arrayed in woman’s garments, i.e., he
exchanges his rough white blanket for a finer yellow one; winds a
band-corset round his breast and puts on a hair-net and bonnet. He is now
to all appearances a woman and goes to the Thesmophorian Festival to find
out the details of the women’s proposal.

The women assemble, and in an elaborate burlesque of a public meeting
recount their grievances against Euripides. It is because of the poet
that men have become so suspicious: they scent a lover everywhere, spy
on their wives, and lock up the store cupboards. Old men who once would
take young wives now remain unmarried, for the poet has told them, ‘When
an old man marries a young wife, the lady is master.’ Finally, by his
atheistical doctrines, Euripides has ruined many an honest flower-girl,
for men do not offer garlands now to the gods. Then Mnesilochus gets up
for the defence. ‘I detest the fellow as much as you do,’ he says; ‘but
it is unreasonable to be annoyed with him for talking about one or two
of our weaknesses—we have ten thousand which he has never mentioned.’
He then proceeds to dilate on some of the frailties which Euripides has
omitted; but he is stopped by his angry audience. ‘There is nothing so
bad as a woman who is naturally shameless’—the chorus say—‘_except it be
a woman_.’

A fierce discussion begins, until their arguments are interrupted by the
appearance of Cleisthenes, one of those womanish men so unpleasantly
familiar in Athens, who tells the assembly that a real man is among
them. Suspicion at once falls on Mnesilochus; he is discovered by plain
evidence to be of the male sex, and is seized by the women. He makes a
gallant attempt to escape by snatching a baby from a woman’s lap, and
holding it to ransom (a parody on Euripides’ _Telephus_); but, when he
unfastens the child’s wrappings, it is not a baby, but a leather skin,
full of wine, which the lady has brought for her private refreshment
during the proceedings. He then decides to send to Euripides for help,
and a parody of the _Palamedes_ ends the first part of the play.

The intermezzo, as we might call it, between the two acts is a humorous
statement of the women’s case on strict Euripidean lines:

    Each and every one [the chorus sings] abuses the tribe of
    women: we are everything that is bad. Well, then, _why do you
    marry us_? Why do you keep us indoors, as though we were
    something very, very precious? Why, if we peep out of a window,
    does every man want to get a good view of our face? As a matter
    of fact, women are better than men, not worse; they are less
    greedy, less dishonest, less vulgar; lastly, they alone are the
    _mothers_ of heroes.

The second act is a series of attempts by Euripides to rescue his
defender. In the first episode the tragedian appears disguised as the
Menelaus of his Helen. Old Mnesilochus is the fair but frail queen, and
the scene is _supposed_ to change to Egypt. But the women refuse to let
their captive free, and he is finally handed over to a north-country
policeman, an illiterate gentleman with a very strong accent. On him
Euripides tries the effect of another tragedy. Disguised as Perseus he
insists that Mnesilochus is the captive maiden, Andromeda, and that
he has come to release her. But the policeman proves obdurate. Then
Euripides plays his last card. Remembering that all policemen have a
_faiblesse_ for the weaker sex, he disguises himself as an old woman,
and comes in, leading by the hand a young and attractive female. The
policeman begins at once to soften, and when the plump flute-girl sits
down on his knee he capitulates, murmuring, ‘What a swaät toöng: it’s
reaäl Attic hoöney!’ A last vestige of professional caution makes him
ask the old lady her name. Euripides, having to choose a title, chooses
a good one, and says, ‘Artemisia,’ which the policeman enters as
‘Artamouxia’ in his note-book, and then, handing over the custody of his
prisoner to the old lady he retires indoors with his young acquaintance.
The other pair hasten to make their escape, and the play ends with the
policeman’s despairing cry, ‘Artamouxia, Artamouxia, where are you?’

The _Lysistrata_, ‘breaker up of armies,’ is a much stronger play, and
the heroine is a masterpiece of dramatic characterisation. From the
beginning of the action, when she stands in the darkness waiting for
the women she has summoned, and frowning with impatience—‘although a
frown spoils her looks,’ as her one companion tells her—until the end,
when, her purpose accomplished, she can say, ‘Let man stand by woman and
woman by man. Good luck to all, and pray God that we make no more of
these mistakes,’ she is a real living woman. If Aristophanes had written
nothing else, _Lysistrata_ shows that he understood the female mind
almost as well as Euripides himself: better far than most women authors,
except only the incomparable Jane, to whose Emma in masterfulness and
independence the Athenian lady bears a close resemblance. The plot of
the play is simple. Under the lead of Lysistrata the women of Athens
make a league with the women of Sparta, Bœotia, Corinth, and the other
Greek States (for the solidarity of women is one of the key-notes of
the play), to stop the war. For this purpose they put into effect both
active and passive measures: they bind themselves by oath to have no
further intercourse with their husbands until peace is made (the women at
first object, but under the lead of the athletic Spartan finally agree),
and they also seize the Acropolis with the treasury. The old men left
at home, and the officials, for most of the men are at the war, try to
use force; but Lysistrata has marshalled and drilled her women. In a
very vivid scene the men attack, but, ‘Up guards, and at them!’ cries
Lysistrata; and the forces of male law and order, as represented by the
Scythian policemen, are put to ignominious flight. Then the men think it
expedient to propose a friendly meeting, and the ‘conversation’ between
Lysistrata and the Chief Commissioner is the most instructive part of the
play.

‘Why have you seized the treasury?’ he asks. Lysistrata explains that
all wars depend on financial considerations, and that the women mean to
stop supplies. His argument, that women have no administrative skill or
financial knowledge, is countered by the plain facts of home management.
‘It is not the same thing,’ says the Commissioner; ‘this is a war fund.’
Then Lysistrata declares that the war has to stop—now, at once.

    In our retiring modesty we have put up long enough with what
    you men have been doing. You would not let us speak, but we
    have not been at all satisfied with you. _We_ knew what was
    going on, although we stay indoors. Over and over again we
    were told of some new big mistake you had made. With pain in
    our hearts we would put on a smile and ask, ‘What have you
    done to-day about the peace?’ ‘But—what’s that to you?’ our
    man would say. ‘Hold your tongue.’ And so I did, then (says
    Lysistrata), but I am not going to now. I have heard the strain
    quite long enough, ‘Men must see to war’s alarms.’ This is my
    version of the tune: ‘Women shall see to war’s alarms’; and
    if you listen to my advice you will not be troubled by war’s
    alarms any more. All you have to do is to hold your tongue, as
    we used to do.

At this the Commissioner breaks in furiously: ‘You accursed baggage, I
hold my tongue before you! Why, you are wearing a veil now to hide your
face. May I die rather.’ But his anger does him little good.

‘If that is your difficulty,’ says Lysistrata, ‘take my veil’—and she
puts it on his head—‘and now hold your tongue; moreover, here is my
wool-basket, so you may munch beans and card the wool; for now “Women,
women never shall be slaves.”’ And so the scene ends with the triumphant
chorus.

Between this, the first act, and the second there is a short interval
of time; and when we see Lysistrata again she is having some difficulty
in keeping her women together and away from their husbands. ‘You long
for your men,’ she says; ‘don’t you think they are longing for you? I am
sure they are finding the nights very hard. Hold out, good friends, and
bear it for a little while longer.’ Her arguments are successful, and
soon the first man comes in, with a baby in his arms, prepared to submit
to any terms. But till the peace is made, no arrangement is possible and
the poor husband goes away unsatisfied. Finally, a joint deputation of
Spartans and Athenians appear before Lysistrata. She, as a woman, and
therefore, she says, a person of sense, has no difficulty in arranging
for them terms of peace which are satisfactory to both sides; and so the
play ends with a ‘necklace’ dance, men and women dancing hand in hand.

But this brief summary gives little idea of all the devices of
stage-craft in which the _Lysistrata_ abounds. It is eminently an acting
play, and can still fill a theatre. The language is certainly gross and
its heroine is entirely lacking in modest reticence, but a glance at the
French adaptation by M. Donnay, of the Academy, and especially at the
additional episodes there introduced, will prove that grossness is not
the worst thing in the world, and that a quiet tongue does not always
mean a virtuous mind.

The Women in Assembly, _Ecclesiazusæ_, is much less vigorous. Written
twenty years later than the _Lysistrata_, it shows plain signs of old
age and failing powers. Euripides and Socrates have both passed away;
the Socratic Circle has broken up. Tragedy is dead, and comedy is dying,
for Aristophanes has lost most of that ‘vis comica’ which was his most
wonderful possession. The influence of Plato is substituted for the
influence of Euripides, and the play is a parody of feminist theories as
they are developed in the Republic.

The construction, however, is poor: the action halts and changes midway
in the play; the first part is effective enough, but it would be more
effective if we did not remember the _Lysistrata_, whose themes it
repeats with less vigour.

At the beginning of the play Praxagora is waiting in the darkness for
the women she has summoned to appear. They have resolved to disguise
themselves as men, and to attend the assembly which has been called for
that morning. There they are to propose and carry a resolution that the
State shall be handed over to the management of women. Presently they
begin to assemble; their husbands are safely in bed and asleep, for their
wives have taken measures that they should have a restful night. Sticks,
cloaks, shoes, and false beards are produced and adjusted, but before
they set out to pack the assembly Praxagora proposes a rehearsal of their
arguments. The ladies who have confined their attention to _looking_ like
men prove not very expert at speaking in the male style, and Praxagora
herself has to give them a sample speech.

    Things go wrong [she says] because we choose our government
    on wrong principles. It is a government by classes, and every
    one considers his own personal interests. Public money is paid
    away for private gain. A government of women would alter all
    this, for women by experience in house management know how to
    get full value for money. Secondly, women are conservative,
    and would never agree to any violent change in the finances or
    the tariff; they are natural economists, and specious cries
    of fair trade would have no effect upon them. Thirdly, as war
    ministers, they are certain to be successful; their experience
    in providing meals will ensure that the soldiers are well fed,
    and they are not likely to risk unduly the lives of their
    own sons. Lastly, women are so used to trickery that it will
    be very hard to trick them. _Therefore_, without any further
    talking or inquiry as to what women are likely to do, the best
    thing is to entrust them with the government.

The women by the end of the speech have learnt their parts, and with
one last instruction to thrust their elbows into the face of any
policeman who tries to interfere they all set out for the assembly.
Then Blepyrus, the elderly husband of Praxagora, appears, and the play
begins to deteriorate, for it is one of the most dexterous touches in the
_Lysistrata_ that the husbands are for the most part away from home, and
therefore can take no part in the action. Blepyrus and his neighbours
have found that their wives have disappeared together with their cloaks
and shoes. While they are standing in doubt they hear strange news. The
assembly convened that morning to consider the vital question of State
reform is already over; it was so well attended and so punctual to time
that many men came too late to vote or to receive their attendance fee.
A resolution has been passed unanimously that tailors shall provide
clothes and bakers bread, free gratis to all; and, furthermore, that the
government shall be in the hands of women. A good-looking young man, who
made a most effective speech, was chiefly responsible for this change
of policy. He pointed out that women could keep a secret far better
than men; that they were in the habit of trusting one another, and that
they never would be likely to plot against the government; moreover,
everything but woman-government had been tried already without much
success, and the experiment was well worth making. Blepyrus and his
friends acquiesce in the _fait accompli_, and when Praxagora returns she
learns from her husband that women are now in authority. The socialistic
State begins at once to take shape. Praxagora decrees a community of
property—land, food, slaves, belong now to the State—every one possesses
everything. Women are part of the community of goods, but to avoid
disputes the less well-favoured women and men are to have the first
choice of partners, and such unions are purely temporary. Law courts,
gambling saloons, and night clubs are all summarily closed; for these
appurtenances of civilisation are incompatible either with socialism
or feminism. The difficulty of work is disposed of by the convenient
institution of slavery, and a _régime_ of universal happiness and
feasting begins.

Thus far the first section of the play. The second part, which is very
inferior, attempts to show the working of the new system. Praxagora
disappears, and the characters are mere mechanical figures. A man, A;
a man, B; a young man; a young woman; three old women. The scenes are
coarse and uninteresting, nor is the prosiness of the dialogue relieved
by any of the vivid touches of humour which mark the poet’s earlier
plays. Finally, this section, like the first, ends with a banquet, given
by the State, and open to all.

The _Ecclesiazusæ_ is plainly inspired by Plato’s theories of communism
and feminism as we have them now in the _Republic_ and the _Laws_.
A further example of the connection between the comedian and the
philosopher is the Aristophanic tale of the origin of sex in Plato’s
Symposium. The story—a Platonic myth with a difference—is so good a
specimen both of Aristophanes’ humour and of the gay fashion in which the
Greeks anticipate modern science that it is a pity its length prevents
quotation.

    In ancient days [according to Aristophanes] there were not two
    sexes but three, the children of the sun, the earth, and the
    moon. Men were round in shape, with four feet and hands, two
    faces, and they were able both to walk and to roll. In the
    pride of their strength they rebelled against heaven, and Zeus
    cut them in twain. Apollo was bidden to heal the places, but
    the two halves pined one for the other, and so in pity the god
    turned their bodies round, and men became in shape such as we
    see them now.

There are many other details, but the most striking point in the story
is the recognition of the original identity of sex. The man and the
woman are not separate and opposite, but rather complementary halves of
one organism, which once included both; they are a divided whole, and
that is why men and women yearn one for the other. How far the tale is
Aristophanes’ invention, how far Plato’s, cannot be decided, but the
doctrine of the identity of sex-qualification is the common possession
of all the Socratic Circle, and forms as clearly the basis of Plato’s
serious philosophy as it does of the humorous apologue of Aristophanes.




XI.—PLATO


Plato differs from most of the Socratic Circle in that he is, above
all things, a visionary and a theorist. He is essentially a masculine
genius (with him we hear nothing of wife and children), and he lacks that
grip of reality which the natural feminist, Euripides, instinctively
possesses. He regarded the condition of society in his native city with
a mixture of dislike and contempt, and he saw that the main cause of
this condition was the indifference to women and children which the
ordinary Athenian prided himself on displaying. In his feminism and his
educational reforms, Plato is deeply influenced by Spartan teaching, but
the main structure is his own work, based not on any actual experience,
but on ideal theory. In this idealism lies both the strength and weakness
of his feminist doctrine. He refuses to allow himself to be influenced,
as Aristotle after him was influenced, by the actual state of inferiority
to which Athenian women had been reduced; but in forming a society
which should be the opposite of the degenerate Athens of his day, he is
inclined to disregard some of the invincible facts of human nature.

Plato’s feminist doctrines are most clearly stated in the fifth book of
the _Republic_ and the sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the _Laws_.
These works are accessible to English readers (or, rather, their rough
substance is accessible, for we can never reproduce the delicate music of
Plato’s prose, and his subtle irony evaporates in English) in Jowett’s
translation, and in the excellent version of the _Republic_ by Davies and
Vaughan. But it may be convenient to give a brief summary of his argument.

In the fifth book of the _Republic_ the ideal State is being discussed,
and the rule κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων (‘among friends everything is common
property’) has been laid down. It has, moreover, been made applicable to
wives and children, for Plato at first hardly escapes from the fallacy
that a man’s wife is as much a piece of property as a dog or a table.
The organization of the communistic _régime_ in detail then comes up
for consideration, but it is unanimously resolved that the question of
community of women is of vital importance and must be explained at once.
The philosopher accordingly, with some pretended reluctance, begins with
a prayer to Nemesis—‘I am on a slippery road, and fear lest missing my
footing I drag my friends down with me’—and thus approaches his subject:

    ‘The aim of our theory was, I believe, to make our men, as it
    were, guardians of a flock?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Let us keep on the same track and give corresponding rules for
    the propagation of the species, and for rearing the young; and
    let us observe whether we find them suitable or not.’

    ‘How do you mean?’

    ‘Thus. Do we think that the females of watch-dogs ought to
    guard the flock along with the males, and hunt with them, and
    share in all their other duties; or that the females ought to
    stay at home, because they are disabled by having to breed and
    rear the cubs, while the males are to labour and be charged
    with all the care of the flocks?’

    ‘We expect them to share in whatever is to be done; only we
    treat the females as the weaker, and the males as the stronger.’

    ‘Is it possible to use animals for the same work if you do not
    give them the same training and education?’

    ‘It is not.’

    ‘If, then, we are to employ the women in the same duties as the
    men, we must give them the same instructions?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘To the men we give music and gymnastic.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Then we must train the women also in the same two arts, giving
    them, besides, a military education and treating them in the
    same way as the men.’

The professional humorist is then requested to refrain from the obvious
jokes suggested by the idea of women stripped for exercise or old ladies
practising athletics, and to remember that all such things are purely
matters of custom. The real question is whether the nature of the human
female is such as to enable her to share in all the employments of the
male, or whether she is wholly unequal to any, or equal to some and not
to others; and, if so, to which class military service belongs. Women
certainly are different from men, but we must not be misled by the word
‘different.’ A bald-headed man is different from a long-haired man, but
he may be just as good a cobbler, or a statesman. So women differ from
men in the part they play in the propagation of the species; but that
difference does not affect the question as to whether men and women
should engage in the same pursuits. The argument of the adaptability of
the sexes to various occupations is discussed, and this point is reached:

    ‘I conclude then, my friend, that none of the occupations which
    comprehend the ordering of a State belong to woman as woman,
    nor yet to man as man; but natural gifts are to be found here
    and there in both sexes alike; and, so far as her nature is
    concerned, the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as
    the man: though in all of them the woman is weaker than the
    man.’

    ‘Precisely so.’

    ‘Shall we, then, appropriate all virtues to men and none to
    women?’

    ‘How can we?’

    ‘On the contrary, we shall hold, I imagine, that one woman may
    have talents for medicine, and another be without them; and
    that one may be musical and another unmusical?’

    ‘Undoubtedly.’

    ‘And shall we not also say, that one woman may have
    qualifications for gymnastic exercises and for war, and another
    be unwarlike and without a taste for gymnastics?’

    ‘I think we shall.’

    ‘Again, may there not be a love of knowledge in one, and a
    distaste for it in another? And may not one be spirited, and
    another spiritless?’

    ‘True again.’

    ‘If that be so, there are some women who are fit, and others
    who are unfit, for the office of guardians. For were not those
    the qualities we selected, in the case of men, as marking their
    fitness for that office?’

    ‘Yes, they were.’

    ‘Then, as far as the guardianship of a state is concerned,
    there is no difference between the natures of the man and of
    the woman, but only various degrees of weakness and strength?’

    ‘Apparently there is none.’

    ‘Then we shall have to select duly qualified women also to
    share in the life and official labours of the duly qualified
    men; since we find that they are competent to the work, and of
    kindred nature with the men.’

It seems to Plato that it is both practicable and desirable that men and
women should have the same training and the same duties; not, indeed, all
men and all women, for Plato’s is an aristocratic State and he is chiefly
legislating for his guardian class, but at least the better men and the
better women. So he does not shrink from absolute similarity of education:

    Then the wives of our guardians must strip for their exercises,
    inasmuch as they will put on virtue instead of raiment, and
    must bear their part in war and the other duties comprised in
    the guardianship of the State, and must engage in no other
    occupations: though of these tasks the lighter parts must be
    given to the women rather than to the men, in consideration of
    the weakness of their sex. But as for the man who laughs at the
    idea of undressed women going through gymnastic exercises, as
    a means of realising what is most perfect, his ridicule is but
    ‘unripe fruit plucked from the tree of wisdom’ and he knows
    not, to all appearance, what he is laughing at or what he is
    doing: for it is, and ever will be, a most excellent maxim,
    that the useful is noble and the hurtful base.

Thus the first wave of the discussion is successfully surmounted: the
second and more dangerous is the proposition that wives and children
shall be held in common. The company refuse to admit without discussion
that it is either desirable or practicable, and a double line of argument
is used. If men and women are educated and live together, human nature
will soon bring about even closer associations. Any irregular union
would be an offence against the State, and it is of the first importance
to science that the best citizens should have the largest number of
children. Therefore marriages and births must be a matter of State
regulation, and any possible discontent must be averted by an elaborate
system of pretence. The details are fixed:

    ‘As fast as the children are born they will be received by
    officers appointed for the purpose, whether men or women, or
    both: for I presume that the State offices also will be held in
    common both by men and women.’

    ‘They will.’

    ‘Well, these officers, I suppose, will take the children of
    good parents and place them in the general nursery under
    the charge of certain nurses, living apart in a particular
    quarter of the city; while the issue of inferior parents,
    and all imperfect children that are born to the others, will
    be concealed, as is fitting, in some mysterious and unknown
    hiding-place.’

    ‘Yes, if the breed of the guardians is to be kept pure.’

    ‘And will not these same officers have to superintend the
    rearing of the children, bringing the mothers to the nursery
    when their breasts are full, but taking every precaution that
    no mother shall know her own child, and providing other women
    that have milk, if the mothers have not enough: and must they
    not take care to limit the time during which the mothers are
    to suckle the children, committing the task of sitting up at
    night, and other troubles incident to infancy, to nurses and
    attendants?’

    ‘You make child-bearing a very easy business for the wives of
    the guardians.’

    ‘Yes, and so it ought to be.’

The second argument may be briefly stated. In the ideal State there will
be no such thing as private property: a man will not have a house or
dogs of his own, _therefore_ (for our philosopher again seems hardly to
realise that the analogy between house and wife is not quite exact), he
will not have a wife and children of his own. The whole subject concludes
with a return to the original topic of equality of opportunity in these
terms:

    ‘Then you concede the principle that the women are to be put
    upon the same footing as the men, according to our description,
    in education, in bearing children, and in watching over the
    other citizens, and that whether they remain at home or
    are sent into the field, they are to share the duties of
    guardianship with the men, and join with them in the chase like
    dogs, and have everything in common with them so far as it is
    at all possible, and that in so doing they will be following
    the most desirable course and not violating the natural
    relation which ought to govern the mutual fellowship of the
    sexes?’

    ‘I do concede all this,’ he replied.

    ‘Then does it not remain for us,’ I proceeded, ‘to determine
    whether this community can possibly subsist among men as it
    can among other animals, and what are the conditions of its
    possibility?’

    ‘You have anticipated me in a suggestion I was about to make.’

    ‘As for their warlike operations, I suppose it is easy to see
    how they will be conducted.’

    ‘How?’ he asked.

    ‘Why, both sexes will take the field together and they will
    also carry with them such of their children as are strong
    enough, in order that, like the children of all other
    craftsmen, they may be spectators of those occupations in
    which, when grown up, they will themselves be engaged: and they
    will require them, besides looking on, to act as servants and
    attendants in all the duties of war, and to wait upon their
    fathers and mothers.’

It will be noticed that Plato does not shrink from the question of
military service for women. If a man is unwilling or unable to defend his
country, he certainly has no claim to citizen rights, nor has a woman.
It may reasonably be argued that the qualification for a vote is neither
property nor sex, but the proof that the individual has passed through
the period of training necessary to qualify him as a defender of the
fatherland. The qualities necessary for a soldier are three: courage,
strength, and skill. No one acquainted with women can doubt that they
possess the first: in the passive courage which a modern soldier chiefly
needs it is possible that women have a slight advantage over men, and
they usually recover more quickly from wounds. The strength that is
required in modern warfare is chiefly endurance: the power to stand
exposure to the weather, insufficient food, lack of sleep and comfort;
marching capacity. No one who knows the vagabonds and strollers of our
English roads will say that women are not capable of supporting all
these hardships as well as men. The female tramp is every whit as sturdy
and hardy as her male companion. Finally, the skill to handle a gun and
the power of shooting straight are matters almost entirely of training:
the natural qualities, a steady hand and a sharp eye, that help such a
training are by no means predominantly male characteristics.

Plato for his part is very insistent on this question, and returns to
it several times in the _Laws_. The State is to maintain schools, where
the art of war in all its branches shall be taught to males and females
alike. Gymnastics and horsemanship are as suitable to women as to men.
Boys and girls together must learn the use of the bow, the javelin, and
the sling, and in every well-ordered community at least one day a month
shall be set aside for warlike exercise, in which men, women and children
shall take part. Female education will include a definite military
training: the girls will learn how to use their weapons and to move about
lightly in armour; the grown woman will study evolutions and tactics.
Finally, in all public festivals and competitions the unmarried girls
shall compete with the youths in running and in contests in armour.

It is on this point of military training, perhaps, that Plato stands
apart from modern sentiment: most of his other ideals of feminine
education are in process of being realised, even that which allowed
the educated woman to become herself a teacher, and rank with male
colleagues. In the inner circle of the Academy, the first University
College of which we know, men and women met on equal terms, and shared
responsibilities and privileges. The names of two such women (neither
of them, be it noted, Athenians) are recorded for us by Dicæarchus and
Lastheneia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Phlius, ‘who even used to wear
male attire,’ hold out their hands across the centuries to Mrs. Bryant
and Miss Busk.

Plato, indeed, in spite of his idealism, is often very practical, and on
the question of marriage his doctrine is most sound.

    The simple law of marriage is this: A man _must_ marry before
    he is thirty-five; if not, he shall be fined and lose all his
    privileges. Mankind are immortal because they leave children
    behind them; and for a man to deprive himself of immortality
    is impiety. He who obeys the law shall be free and pay no
    fine; but the disobedient shall pay a yearly fine, in order
    that he may not imagine that his celibacy will bring him ease
    or profit: moreover, he shall not share in any of the honours
    which the State gives to the aged.

Marriage is to be regarded as a duty, and ‘every man shall follow,
not after the marriage which is most pleasing to himself, but after
that which is most beneficial to the State.’ This cannot be effected
by definite regulations, but we should ‘try and charm the spirits of
men into believing’ that their children are of more importance than
themselves, and that a child’s disposition will depend upon the happy
blending of its parents.

Plato realises that children are the State’s vital interest, and his
concern for them extends to the period before birth. Husband and wife
are to consider how they are to produce for the State the best and
fairest specimens of children which they can. If proper attention is
given to anything, success is certain; and the eugenic system is to be
under the definite control of a committee of women, who shall meet every
day and spend a third part of the day in ensuring that the regulations
for perfect births are duly carried out. Their care is to be expressly
extended to the future mothers, for the period of a child’s life before
birth is equally decisive, and the young wife must be carefully tended,
kept from excessive pleasures or pains, and be encouraged to cultivate
habits of gentleness, benevolence, and kindness.

Then comes the proper management of infants, and Plato is very convinced
of the importance of constant motion for the young child, who in a Greek
household was often closely bandaged in swaddling clothes and left to its
own resources. He anticipates Aristippus, who, holding that pleasure was
the chief end of life, found the best definition of pleasure to be ‘a
gentle motion,’ and he is prepared to make his ideal state for infants at
least a pleasant one.

    The first principle in relation both to the body and soul of
    very young children is that nursing and moving about by day
    and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are
    the more they will need it. Infants should live, if it were
    possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. Exercise and
    motion in the earliest years greatly contribute to create a
    part of virtue in the soul: the child’s virtue is cheerfulness,
    and good nursing makes a gentle and a cheerful child.

This first period will last till the age of three, when the child will
begin to find out its own natural modes of amusement in company with
other children: from three to six, boys and girls should live and
play together: after six they should separate, and begin to receive
instruction.

On the subject of co-education, which may be regarded as the best
practical solution for the cure of sex-ignorance, Plato speaks with a
rather uncertain voice. His general theory presupposes an identity of
training, and the free mingling of boys and girls, young men and women,
in sport and work. But he is disturbed by his conviction of the natural
badness of boys contrasted with girls:

    Of all animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch
    as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated;
    he is the most insidious, sharp-witted, and insubordinate of
    creatures; therefore he must be bound with many bridles.

The further difficulty, that constant friendly intercourse between young
men and women may lead to undesirable results is discussed at some length
in the _Laws_, p. 835, and the very sensible conclusion is arrived at
that a healthy public opinion will be the first result of these natural
conditions of comradeship, and that the general sentiment will be the
strongest of checks upon undue licence. The importance of example in
education and morals is rightly insisted upon:

    The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the
    same time: not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out
    your own admonitions in practice.

Finally, education is of supreme importance to a country:

    The minister of education is the most important officer of
    State; of all appointments his is the greatest; he will rule
    according to law, must be fifty years old, and have children of
    his own, both boys and girls by preference, at any rate one or
    the other.

These are some of the salient points of Plato’s teaching, but a careful
reading of the _Republic_ and the _Laws_ will reveal many further issues
and many side-lights on the main thesis. Plato does not trouble to be
rigorously consistent, and, like Euripides, he does not hesitate at times
to play the part of the candid friend, and to point out what he thinks
are the natural weaknesses of the female sex. Sometimes he is right,
sometimes he is wrong. ‘Women,’ he says, ‘are too prone to secrecy and
stealth; they are accustomed to creep into dark places and resist being
dragged into the light.’

Here Plato seems to hit the truth. If there is one quality—call it
virtue or vice, as you will—which is peculiarly a woman’s and not a
man’s characteristic, it is secretiveness. The result of many centuries
of self-suppression, it gives a certain aggravating charm to the female
mind, and usually does no particular harm. But it is, perhaps, the
chief reason of women’s comparative failure in literature. Sincerity in
writing is the saving grace, and if a book is not frank, it should never
be written. Few women authors resemble Sappho, or Jane Austen, or Mme.
Colette in contemporary French literature, who, unlike though they are
in the circumstances of their lives, do all make a serious attempt at
truth. Most women fail in frankness towards themselves and their readers.
George Eliot, Ouida, George Sand (to take another typical and strongly
differentiated trio) dissemble their facts as much as they dissemble
their names. Like ostriches, they hide their faces under a cloud of
words.




XII.—THE ATTIC ORATORS


To turn from Plato’s ideal State to the actual condition of woman’s
life during the fourth century in Athens, as we have it revealed in
the pages of the orators, is like passing from a breezy hillside into
a dark, close-shut room. We see the working of the harem system, with
all its atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion. The women are closely
watched; for it is presumed that they will be unfaithful to their
husbands if they can: they live secluded in the women’s quarter of the
house—the gynæconitis—and for any strange man to enter their rooms is
a grave impropriety. In Demosthenes, for example, we find it imputed
to Androtion, as a proof of unbearable insolence, that in his capacity
of tax-collector he forced his way into the women’s apartments, and
compelled the master of the house to hide under the bed, putting him
thus to shame before his womankind. That a wife should appear publicly
with her husband at a dinner party, and take a share in men’s pleasures,
is equally an offence against morality. Neæra was known to have sat at
dinner with her husband and his friends, and this fact, testified by
witnesses, is taken as an obvious proof that she was a woman of abandoned
character. The sister of Nicodemus, Isæus argues, could not have been
legally married, for she was often seen at entertainments with the man
she called her husband, and ‘wedded wives do not go out to dinner with
their husbands, or expect to join in festivities.’

The doctrine that a wife is her husband’s property is applied to the
fullest extent, and any offence against that property is punished with
the utmost rigour of the law. A husband who finds another man in his
harem is allowed to put him to death. At Athens there is no pretence of
‘the sanctity of marriage’: the offence and the punishment is the same
whether the intrigue is with the master’s wife or with his concubine:
each is equally the master’s property, to be protected at any cost. It
is a more heinous crime to make love to a woman who belongs to another
man than to offer her violence; for the offence is viewed solely from the
owner’s side, and a woman who willingly yields to another is outraging
her lawful master’s _amour propre_ more deeply than if she were taken by
force. The lover is put to death; the ravisher pays a fine: the point
of view being much the same as used to hold in English law, where the
wife-beater was regarded as a less offensive character than the poacher.

But if the husband of an erring wife had the support of the law, however
violent his methods of revenge, the case was very different when the
woman was the offended party. There is an anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of
Alcibiades which reveals the attitude of the Athenian lawgivers.

    Hipparete made a prudent and affectionate wife;—but at last
    growing very uneasy at her husband’s associating with such
    a number of courtesans, both strangers and Athenians, she
    quitted his house and went to her brother’s. Alcibiades went
    on with his debaucheries, and gave himself no pain about his
    wife; but it was necessary for her, in order to obtain a legal
    separation, to give in a bill of divorce to the archon, and to
    appear personally with it; for the sending of it by another
    hand would not do. When she came to do this according to law,
    Alcibiades rushed in, caught her in his arms, and carried her
    through the market-place to his own house, no one presuming
    to oppose him, or to take her from him. From that time she
    remained with him until her death, which happened not long
    after, when Alcibiades was upon his voyage to Ephesus. Nor does
    the violence used in this case seem to be contrary to the laws
    either of society in general or of that republic in particular.
    For the law of Athens, in requiring her who wants to be
    divorced to appear publicly in person, probably intended to
    give the husband an opportunity to meet with her and to recover
    her.—_Plutarch, ‘Alcibiades,’ Langhorne’s Translation._

A wife seeking to escape from an unworthy husband, we see, is regarded
in the same light as a slave seeking to escape from his owner, and all
the resources of the law are put at the disposal of the husband and
the master. There was a constant tendency to think of women and slaves
together; and the institution of slavery was certainly one of the most
powerful agents in the degradation of women at Athens. A slave-girl was,
in the eye of the law, a thing—not a human being, and she was free from
all restraints of moral sanction. She was the property of her owner,
and her only duty was to obey him in all things: virtue, chastity,
modesty, were for her things impossible of attainment; and over the whole
business was cast the protection and encouragement of the law. There
came into existence a class of women condemned to physical and moral
degradation—a class whose very existence was an insult to womankind; so
that Aristophanes, at least, has the wit to see that the establishment of
a female government would have as one of its first results the forcible
abolition of all such recognised and legal forms of vice.

Women and slaves then were linked together; and it must be remembered,
as Professor Murray says, that people do not become slaves by a legal
process; they become slaves when they are brought into contact with
superiors who have the power and the will to use them as tools. There
are three principal tests of slavery, ancient or modern, and in ancient
life they will often apply equally well to women. Firstly, slaves are
a degraded and immoral class. This was continually insisted upon; and
doubtless one result was to produce, in a certain degree, the vices
falsely imputed to nature.

Secondly, their work is despised, as unworthy of free men. The harder
work was left in the hands of slaves or women, who did not receive any
pay, and the super-abundant leisure of the male citizen was devoted to
the political life.

Thirdly, the condition of dependence, once fully established, soon
produces a feeling of despair. The willingness to die, which is so
noticeable in Euripides’ heroines, is one of the sure signs of slavery.
Slaves are lacking in spirit; some, indeed, are so completely lacking
that they are happy in servitude: the impetus to revolt must come from
without, especially when the servile state has existed for many centuries.

Slavery may be defined as the economic exploitation of the weaker;
and, though it does not exist in our time and land, it offers such a
convenient basis for civilisation that various devices are used even now
to take its place. There is the theory, for example, that some kinds of
work are _higher_ than others, and therefore should be paid on a higher
scale. Or again, that the same work, if performed by different persons,
requires different remuneration.

Many estimates of women’s inferiority have ultimately an economic basis.
The more lucrative trades and professions are those for which it is
considered that women are temperamentally unfit.

It is a noticeable fact that all these general conceptions of women’s
weakness have always been closely connected with their legal status. In
Athens, where women could not hold property, and an heiress was taken
over by the nearest male relative as a necessary encumbrance on the
estate, the estimate of woman’s character was very low. In Alexandria
and at Rome, where women by various devices outwitted the law and became
possessed of some degree of economic independence, their moral position
also changed for the better. In England feminism begins with the Married
Women’s Property Act.

But as long as slavery, social or economic, is not recognised by the
law, it cannot be the curse that it was to ancient life. In Athens it
was a legal institution, owing its validity to much the same mode of
thought as made the wife also her husband’s chattel. It is the business
of lawyers to defend the law, and, if the law is bad, their moral sense
is necessarily warped in the process; so that it is not surprising if
the private speeches of the Attic orators, although they exhibit the
natural subtlety of the Athenians in a striking light, by no means
give an equally strong impression of moral rectitude. All the orators
are the same in this respect. Demosthenes in matters of State was a
high-minded patriot; as a lawyer he is, like the rest of his colleagues,
a professional liar, and does not scruple to falsify and misrepresent
the truth. Lysias so forgets the man in the advocate that he seems to
reserve his highest powers for his worst cases, and obviously delights
in such a client as the shameless old cripple for whom he writes his
most ingenious speech. Isæus has no regard for veracity, and it has been
found by painful experience that his unsupported statements, even on
simple questions of fact, are, to put it mildly, extremely unreliable. As
for Hyperides, he is careless of shame so long as he wins his case; and
his gesture, as he bids his fair client display her charms, is like the
calculated boldness of the slave-dealer offering his girls to the highest
bidder.

But if the orators give us an impression of cunning subtlety which far
transcends the bounds that we even now allow to lawyers, their clients
are in no better case. By the middle of the fourth century Athens was in
full decadence. Her men had lost all the vigour and courage that brought
their country safe through the dangers of the Persian Wars: her women,
perhaps, were even worse than the men—_corruptio optimi pessima_—and had
sunk into a state of utter degradation.

Impotent old men and designing young women are the chief figures in most
of Isæus’ speeches; and, as his editor says, to have any confidence in
the veracity or virtue of his clients argues a truly Arcadian simplicity.
There is the case of Euctemon, for example—the old man who divorces his
wife and leaves his children, to live with his slave-woman, Alce. This
unfortunate, whose youth has been degraded for her master’s profit, has
her revenge when the old man grows senile. She induces him to remove her
from the den of infamy which has been one of the sources of his wealth,
to live with her in the drinking-shop over which she is put in charge,
and finally to recognise one of her bastards as his own son. The family,
threatened by a second marriage, reluctantly consent to help in an
adoption which ran counter to the first principles of Attic law; and it
is not until the old man’s death, when his property falls into dispute,
that his ‘misfortunes’ with the woman (so the advocate euphemistically
describes them) come to light. The facts of the case are utterly sordid;
but every detail is enveloped by Isæus in a cloud of sophistical
arguments which show both a complete absence of moral sense in the
advocate and so great a faculty of deception that modern writers have
inferred—it need not be said with how little reason—that polygamy was
not illegal at Athens, that concubinage was recognised by law, and that
bastards had the rights of legitimate children. All three statements are
untrue; but they may fairly be deduced from the ever-shifting arguments
that the lawyer uses. In another of his cases it is an old man at death’s
door who marries a young girl, and the usual imputations upon the bride’s
motives form one of his strongest arguments. In a third, the estate of
Pyrrhus, a woman of notoriously bad life is foisted by her brother upon
one of her old lovers, and the claim is then made that she is his legal
wife.

But to go through the details of Isæus’ cases would be merely tedious.
In all of them we see that moral degradation and absence of social
rectitude which was the natural result of the inferiority of women in
the eyes of the Attic law. Women, like children, cannot legally enter
into a contract, even if it is only to purchase a bushel of corn; the
son of a brother has a stronger claim to an intestate property than the
son of a daughter, for the law says, ‘males must prevail’; a daughter
cannot inherit in her own person; she is only an intermediary by whom the
estate is transmitted through marriage to a male of the same blood as her
father. A woman’s disabilities are painfully plain in Isæus: as for her
legal rights, it is hard to discover from his speeches how far they have
any actual existence. The orator, at least, when his male clients seem
to have the law against them, does not hesitate to appeal to the natural
sympathies of the male jurymen; and in the tenth oration we see how
shamefully an heiress, in spite of the law’s formal protection, could be
despoiled by her guardian and her brother.

It is generally assumed that this male superiority before the law had a
religious sanction, the necessity of keeping up the family worship, which
could only be done by a man. If we were speaking of a primitive society
the argument would have some force, but the Athenians of the fourth
century were at the end rather than the beginning of their national life:
religion was dead, and the foundations of morality undermined; only the
law remained unaltered, that women were the inferior sex. How far women
contributed themselves to their degradation may be studied in all the
orators’ speeches, but two cases are especially significant: Antiphon’s
murder speech ‘Against the stepmother,’ and Lysias’ ‘Defence for the
murder of Eratosthenes.’

The first is grimly horrible in its sordid realism; as Antiphon says,
it is the story of Clytemnestra repeated, but divested now of all its
tragic romance. Two women are the chief characters: one a free-born
Athenian, the wife of the murdered man; the other a slave, the mistress
of the man’s friend, one Philoneos. The facts are these: Philoneos gets
tired of his mistress’ devotion, and determines to rid himself of her
by the simple process of selling her into a life of utter degradation.
He reveals his intention to his friend, and the two men decide to have
one last carouse, the girl waiting upon them, before she goes to her
ruin. But the man’s wife, who has found her husband as false to her as
Philoneos is to his lover, intervenes. She makes the acquaintance of the
slave-girl, who is still passionately devoted to her worthless master,
and persuades her to regain his affection by a love-potion which she
will provide. The girl agrees, and when the two men meet at dinner she
pours the potion (which, unknown to her, is a deadly poison) into their
cups, giving the larger share to her own false lord. Philoneos falls dead
immediately; the other man collapses, and dies some days afterwards. The
slave-girl is taken and broken on the wheel; the wife is in this speech
accused by her stepson of her share in the crime.

Antiphon’s pleadings throw a lurid light on the relations between men and
women in a slave State; the speech of Lysias in defence of Eratosthenes’
murder is an even more invaluable document. The orator’s client is
accused of murder, and relies for his defence on the plea that his victim
was taken in adultery, and therefore lawfully put to death. The law, at
Athens a written, not an unwritten code, is definitely on the accused
man’s side; but it is curious that this is the only surviving speech
in which it is pleaded as an excuse. It seems, indeed, that even the
Athenians hesitated to use the ferocious power that the law gave them;
and we may imagine, if we will, that this was a test case, brought,
perhaps, by one of the Socratic circle, to try the validity of the law in
the face of the new feminist doctrines. In any event, the Ionian Lysias,
whose honeyed pen was at the service of the highest bidder, was a person
thoroughly distasteful to Plato and his friends, and it is probable that
in this speech he had the satisfaction both of defending the established
order of social morality, and also of striking a shrewd blow at his
personal enemies. The speech, which is a model of art, begins with some
compliments to the jury, and then Lysias, very ingeniously, makes his
client tell the simple story of his life.

    When I decided to marry, gentlemen, and brought a wife into
    my house, I made this my rule of behaviour. I did not annoy
    her with excessive vigilance, but on the other hand, I did not
    leave her too much her own mistress to do whatever she pleased.
    I kept as close a guard over her as was possible and took all
    reasonable care.

(This to conciliate the jury and to show that the damage done was not due
to any lack of precautions on the owner’s side.)

    After a time a child was born and then I began to feel
    confidence, and handed over to her the charge of all my goods,
    thinking that this was the surest bond of union between us.
    At first, gentlemen, she was the best of women, a clever
    housewife and a thrifty, exact in all her management. Then
    my mother died, and her death has been the cause of all my
    troubles. My wife went to her funeral; that fellow saw her
    walking in the funeral procession, and after a time succeeded
    in corrupting her.

(The jury are meant to draw the inference that women should never leave
the house: one appearance in public may mean ruin.)

    He watched my wife’s maid who goes to do the marketing, made a
    proposal to her, and soon effected his purpose of seduction. I
    must tell you, gentlemen, that my humble home is built in two
    storeys, the upper part similar in style to the ground floor,
    one containing the women’s apartments, the other the men’s
    rooms. Now when our baby was born, the mother began by nursing
    it herself, and to avoid any risk of her coming down stairs at
    bath-time, I took up my quarters in the upper rooms, and the
    women came down to the ground floor. Moreover, we soon got into
    the way of my wife leaving me to go and sleep with the baby
    downstairs, so that she might give him the breast and prevent
    him crying.

(It is, of course, essential that the master’s rest at night should not
be disturbed, and the jury will agree that this was a legitimate reason
for a wife’s absence from her proper place.)

    This went on for a long time and I never suspected anything.
    Such an arrant simpleton was I that I thought _my_ wife the
    most virtuous woman in Athens. Well, gentlemen, time passed
    away, and one day I came back home unexpectedly from the
    country. After dinner the baby began to cry and make itself
    unpleasant: the maid was hurting it on purpose to cause a
    disturbance, as I heard afterwards, for the fellow was in the
    house. I told my wife to go and give it the breast to stop it
    crying, but at first she would not go: she pretended that she
    was so delighted to see me after my long absence. Finally,
    when I began to get angry and bade her be off, ‘Oh, yes,’ she
    said, ‘you want to stay here and make love to the parlourmaid;
    I caught you pulling her about the other day when you were
    drunk.’ At that I smiled, and she got up and went away, pulling
    the door to in pretended jest, and taking away the key. I did
    not think anything of it, nor had I any suspicions: indeed,
    I soon fell asleep, for I had just come from the country and
    was glad to get rest. It was getting on for daybreak when
    she returned and opened the door. I asked her then why the
    doors had been banging in the night, and she pretended that
    the child’s lamp had blown out, and she had gone next door
    to get a light. I said nothing and believed her tale. I did,
    however, notice that her face was covered with powder—although
    her brother had not been dead a month—but still I said nothing
    about her conduct. I went out and left the house in silence.

(White cheeks were highly esteemed at Athens, and when a lady wished
to be especially attractive, she procured them artificially. In this
case the husband is distracted by a double feeling: gratification at
his wife’s apparent desire to please him, and disgust at her obvious
disrespect for a male relative.)

    Some time elapsed after these events, gentlemen, and I had no
    inkling of my misfortune, when one day an old person came up
    to me. She was sent, as I heard afterwards, by another woman
    that fellow had seduced and then abandoned, who, in her rage
    and indignation had spied on him until she found out the reason
    of his desertion. Well, the old lady came to me near my house,
    where she was watching, and ‘Euphiletus,’ said she, ‘don’t
    think that I have come in any spirit of officious interference:
    the man who is wronging you and your wife, as it happens, is an
    enemy of mine. If you take the maid who goes to market and does
    your errands, and torture her, you will find out everything.
    The man is Eratosthenes, of Oea: he is responsible for this; he
    has seduced your wife and many other women besides: that is his
    trade.

So the warning comes, and then events move quickly. The husband takes
the servant, and by a mixture of promises and threats compels her not
only to confess, but to betray her mistress. When next the lover comes
to the house—it is alleged by the prosecution that he is beguiled there
by the husband, and although this is denied, it is regarded as a quite
legitimate plot—the maid informs her master; witnesses are hastily
summoned; the door, left unfastened by the girl, is pushed open and the
guilty pair are discovered together. Eratosthenes is struck down, his
arms are pinioned, and then in the name of the law and in cold blood he
is killed. The scene is like the last act of _Scheherazade_ without its
barbaric magnificence. Of the woman nothing is said, and the speaker
concludes by reminding his judges that his cause is theirs, and that
the only way to prevent illicit love is to take summary vengeance on the
lover.

The point of view, it will be noticed, as regards the marriage
relationship, is very different from that expressed by Plato or
Aristotle. Plato regards marriage as a temporary connection dictated by
mutual interest and dissolvable at will. Aristotle says (_Politics_, 7,
16):

    As to adultery, let it be held disgraceful for any man or woman
    to be unfaithful when they are man and wife. If during the time
    of bearing children anything of the sort occur, let the guilty
    person be punished with a loss of privileges in proportion to
    the offence.

The philosophers see that marital fidelity is important chiefly in
relation to children and the State, and they attach the same stigma
to either of the parties who break the contract. Lysias, as a lawyer,
suiting his arguments to a male audience, takes much lower ground. The
husband smiles at his own infidelities, but claims the right to commit
murder when his wife retaliates.

The _Eratosthenes_ is, perhaps, the most vivid picture we have of
home-life in Athens, but the general impression given by all the orators
is much the same. Women are either cowed into hopeless submission or
else they are shamelessly profligate. The occasional exceptions, such
as we find in Lysias’ speech ‘Against Diogiton,’ where a widow defends
her children’s interests with skill and vigour, show that the fault
was due to the marriage system rather than to woman’s nature. Most of
the women, however, are incapable of energy: their prison life has
deprived them of the power and will to act. In Lysias’ speech ‘Against
Simon,’ for example, the speaker, a bachelor living in an abominable
relationship, has his sister and nieces as inmates of his house, and he
says: ‘These ladies’ life has been so decent and orderly that they are
ashamed even for the men of their own household to set eyes upon them.’
In Demosthenes’ speech ‘Against Conon,’ his unfortunate client, again a
bachelor, has his mother keeping house for him. When, after his encounter
with the ‘Fighting Cocks’ Club’ he is carried home, his cloak stolen, his
lip split, and both eyes closed, the ladies of his establishment, his
mother and his female attendants, begin to weep and wail over his sad
condition—but they do nothing else. His male acquaintances carry him off
to the public bath, there fetch a doctor, and finally remove him to the
house of a friend. Even as ministering angels the Athenian women seem to
have been ineffective. Only in the case of the imprisonment or the death
of their male relatives do they come actively forward, and the business
of mourning and funeral lamentation was by convention left almost
entirely in their hands.

Most of the Athenian women then, as we see them in the writings of the
orators, are mere passive animals; a few, and by no means the least
successful, are open in their profligacy. Such an one is the mother of
Æschines, as we have her described by Demosthenes in the speech ‘On the
Crown’; such also the abominable pair, mother and daughter, who are the
chief characters in the speech ‘Against Neæra,’ which is attributed
to Demosthenes. Here the mother, Neæra, a woman of notoriously bad
character, succeeds in marrying an Athenian citizen, and her daughter
Phanô, a person as vicious as herself, by one of those strange turns
of fortune only possible in a real democracy, becomes the wife of the
King-Archon, the head of the State religion, as we might say, wife of the
Archbishop of Canterbury. Such another, finally, is the fair Antigona
in Hyperides’ speech ‘Against Athenogenas,’ a lady who combined the
professions of broker and courtesan, and was equally successful in both.

Of women who were both virtuous and capable the orators tell us
singularly little, and the probable reason is that such women in Athens
had almost ceased to exist. Demosthenes and his contemporaries represent
the last stage, when their country was already on the brink of political
extinction, and the men of Athens had no ideals or examples of womanly
virtue to encourage them in their vain struggle against the great
military power of the North. The lack of good women was a fatal disaster,
but it was a disaster which the Athenians had brought upon themselves,
and it led them straight to ruin.




XIII.—ARISTOTLE


As the political life of Athens ends with Demosthenes, so the creative
force of the Greek genius ceases with Aristotle. There are some brilliant
and many charming writers after his time, but they rely for all the
originality of their thought on their great predecessors. Aristotle is
the last of the creators: ‘_tout le reste, c’est littérature_.’

Hence his unique importance in the history of human thought: not merely
is he, perhaps, the greatest mind that Greece produced, but he has the
advantage of coming last in the long line of thinkers on whom nearly all
our intellectual life even now depends. In every department of civilised
existence the influence of Aristotle must still be taken into account,
and his judgment of women’s position in society—a view sincerely held
and on the whole most temperately expressed—has had far more effect on
the world than have the idealist theories of Plato. His statement of
the moral disabilities of women is to be found best in the _Ethics_; of
their social disabilities in the treatise _On Generation_. The following
quotations are from the English translations of those works by Welldon,
Jowett, and Platt.

To begin with the moral situation in the _Ethics_. Aristotle several
times repeats the statement, common enough in ancient literature, though
it seems now open to serious objection, that women are less temperate and
continent in their desires than men. He does not blame them, but rather
regards them with pity, ‘for a woman is naturally in such matters weaker
than a man: a man’s love is passionate and open; women feel desire and
are cunning.’[1] A line from _The Beguiling of Zeus_ is quoted to support
this view by the authority of Homer, and the philosopher himself agrees
with the common Greek view that for a woman to wish to keep her husband
to herself was a proof that she was both unreasonable and lascivious.
So, in discussing certain morbid habits, such as the practice of biting
one’s nails or eating cinders, Aristotle has the significant remark: ‘Now
whenever nature is the cause of these habits nobody would call people
who give way to them incontinent, any more than we should call women
incontinent from being not males but females.’[2] It is, perhaps, this
belief in the natural incapacity of women for virtue that is the cause
of the depreciatory remarks concerning the essential excellence of an
Athenian woman, ‘bashful modesty.’

    It would not be right to speak of a sense of shame as a virtue,
    for it is more like an emotion than a moral state: at least
    it may be defined as a kind of fear of ignominy, and in its
    effects it is analogous to the fear of dangers, for people
    blush when they are ashamed and turn pale when they are afraid
    of death. It is clear, then, that both affections are in a
    sense corporeal, and this seems to be the mark of an emotion
    rather than a moral state.[3]

Other slighter defects in the female character, as conceived by
Aristotle, are hinted at in the remark: ‘It is only exceedingly slavish
people who eat and drink beyond the point of surfeit’; and in the
well-known description of the ‘Magnanimous Man,’ Aristotle’s ideal, who,
unlike the shrill-voiced woman,

    will have a deep voice and a sedate manner of speaking and be
    slow in his movements: he will not be in a hurry or emphatic
    in speech, for there are not many things he cares for, nor
    does he regard anything as very important, and these are the
    causes which make people speak in shrill tones and use rapid
    movements.[4]

These are some of the deficiencies in women: we have to go to the
_Rhetoric_ to get Aristotle’s idea of their merits. The passage is
significant:

    θηλειῶν δὲ ἀρετή σώματος μὲν κάλλος καὶ μέγεθος, ψύχης δὲ
    σωφροσύνη καὶ φιλεργία ἄνευ ἀνελευθερίας.[5]

The excellence of females is (_a_) physical, a large and beautiful body;
(_b_) mental, virtuous moderation and a love—but not a sordid love—of
work.

First, it will be seen, comes physical attractiveness. The excellent
woman must be good-looking, and by ‘good-looking’ we mean tall and stout,
for ethereal grace does not suit the harem-master’s taste. Secondly,
she will be temperate in her desires: the word ‘Sophrosyne,’ ‘virtuous
moderation,’ is the chief virtue in a woman: it is the faculty of ‘doing
without’—love, food, pleasure, consideration, etc.—and the Greeks,
unlike the Romans, really did admire this passive merit even in men.
Thirdly comes industry, with the restriction that a woman must not be
a slave to work: she has other even more important duties—her master’s
pleasure, for example—and work must not be allowed to interfere unduly.
In his conception of female virtue Aristotle has advanced somewhat from
Pericles’ negative ideal, but he has not got very far.

The most instructive passages, however, in the _Ethics_ are in the Eighth
Book, where friendship is considered.

    There is another kind of friendship or love depending upon
    superiority, the friendship or love of a father for a son, of a
    husband for a wife, of a ruler for a subject. These friendships
    are of different sorts: the love of a husband for a wife is not
    the same as that of wife for a husband. There is a different
    virtue in each, a different function, and different motives.
    It follows that the services rendered by each party to the
    other are not the same, nor is it right to expect they should
    be. In all such friendships as depend upon the principle of
    superiority, the affection should be proportionate to the
    superiority; _i.e._, the better or the more useful party, or
    whoever may be the superior, should receive more affection than
    he gives.

This may sound to us humorous, but Aristotle is quite serious: it is part
of his great doctrine of ‘proportional equality’; and his only doubt is
as to which adjective is most appropriate to man, ‘better,’ or ‘more
useful,’ or simply ‘superior.’[6] Friendship leads to a discussion of
domestic associations, and while the _rule_ of a slave-master seems a
_right_ form of despotism, the association of husband and wife is judged
to be ‘aristocratical,’ for the husband’s rule depends upon merit and is
confined to its proper sphere. He assigns to the wife all that suitably
belongs to her. If the husband is lord of _everything_, he changes the
association to an ‘oligarchy’; for then he acts unfairly and not in
virtue of his superior merit. ‘Sometimes the wife rules as being an
heiress, but such rule is not based upon merit.’[7]

Last comes the question of children; and here, at least, we need make no
criticisms:

    It is evident why mothers love their children more than
    fathers. The procreation of children is the universal function
    of animals. In the case of other animals, this is the limit
    of their association; but men and women unite not only for
    the procreation of children but for the purposes of life. As
    soon as they unite, a distribution of functions takes place.
    Some are proper to the husband and others to the wife; hence
    they supply one another’s needs, each contributing to the
    common stock. Utility and pleasure seem alike to be found
    in the marriage relationship, but its basis will be virtue,
    too. Children are a bond of union, and such marriages as are
    childless are dissolved with comparatively little difficulty.[8]

The _Politics_ begin with a discussion of slavery, and, by an association
of ideas natural in Greek society, for Aristotle never attempts to rise
above the conditions of life about him, slaves and women are treated
together:

    He who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to
    be lord and master; and he who can work with his body is a
    subject, and by nature a slave: hence, master and slave have
    the same interest. Nature, however, has distinguished between
    the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly; she makes
    each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best
    made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among
    barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves.

It should be noticed here that the essential quality of the master is not
physical strength, but mental capacity; it is the mind and not the body
that makes the ‘natural’ slave, the ‘live tool,’ as Aristotle defines
him. Man and woman, master and slave, these are the foundations of the
family. As Hesiod says: ‘First a house, then a woman, and then an ox for
the plough’; and Aristotle has no difficulty in finding the arrangement
right. He puts the question:

    Is there any one intended by nature to be a slave, so that
    for him the condition of slavery is expedient and right; or,
    rather, is not all slavery a violation of nature?

And gives the immediate reply:

    There is no difficulty in answering this question on grounds
    both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and
    others be ruled is a thing not only necessary but expedient;
    from the hour of their birth some are marked out for
    subjection, others for rule.

The law, he thinks, holds through all nature:

    Tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame
    animals are better off when they are ruled by men, for then
    they are preserved. The male is by nature superior, and the
    female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this
    principle of necessity extends to all mankind. Nature would
    like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves;
    but this does not hold universally.

So the string of assertions goes on, and the discussion closes:

    It is clear, _therefore_, that some men are by nature free
    and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both
    expedient and right.

Having thus justified slavery to his own satisfaction, Aristotle proceeds
to deal with household management, which he subdivides into three parts:
the rule of a master over slaves, of a father, and of a husband:

    A husband and a father rules over wife and children, both free,
    but the rule differs: over his children it is a royal, over
    his wife a constitutional rule. For, although there may be
    exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter
    for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown
    is superior to the younger and more immature.

To illustrate his point, Aristotle quotes the saying of Amasis and his
foot-pan, a good story, although it does not exactly strengthen the
philosopher’s position. Amasis was a commoner, who became King of Egypt;
to prove to his subjects the essential equality of all matter, he had
his metal bath melted down and re-cast as a statue, to which all the
people made humble obeisance, although they had treated the foot-pan with
contempt. Then Amasis drew his moral: the substance of both bath and
statue is the same; there is merely a difference in outward form. ‘Of
this kind,’ says Aristotle, ‘is the relation between male and female; but
there _the inequality is permanent_.’

It is the business of household management to ensure excellence, and we
are faced at once by a difficulty: can a slave possess virtue? If he has
virtue, in what will he differ from a freeman? A similar question may be
raised about women and children: ought a woman to be called temperate,
brave, and just? Aristotle solves the difficulty thus:

    Women and slaves have a sort of virtue, the virtue of the
    irrational part of the soul. The slave has no deliberate
    faculty at all; the woman has it, but with her it is
    inconclusive. The ruler must have moral virtue in perfection;
    the subject requires only that measure of virtue which is
    proper to him. Virtue will be common to man and woman, but it
    will not be the same virtue: _e.g._, the courage of a man is
    shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.

These are hard sayings, and they bring Aristotle into direct conflict
with Plato, who, in the _Meno_, discusses the question whether the
virtue of a man and a woman is the same or different, and comes to
the conclusion that it is the same. But Aristotle never hesitates to
criticise his former teacher, and it is a curious point how far his low
estimate of women is not the result of the pupil’s unconscious reaction
against a master’s enthusiasm. A great part of the _Politics_ is, in
fact, a criticism of the _Republic_, and the discussion on slavery, which
occupies most of the first book, is followed by a close consideration
of Plato’s communistic State. The objections raised are of a severely
practical nature, _e.g._:

    If the women are shared in common, and private property is
    retained, the men will see to the fields; but who will see to
    the house?

And again:

    Two virtues are destroyed in the communistic State; first,
    temperance towards women (for it is an honourable action
    to abstain from another man’s wife for temperance’ sake);
    secondly, liberality in the matter of property. The legislation
    of such a State may have a specious appearance of benevolence,
    but such evils as there are in property are due to a cause that
    laws cannot eradicate: the wickedness of human nature. Indeed,
    we see that there is much more quarrelling among those who have
    all things in common, though there are not many of them, than
    there is among the vast majority of men who keep to private
    property.

The criticism, however, although acute on points of detail, does not
touch the essentials of feminism, and, in the _Politics_, Aristotle often
reveals himself unconsciously as Plato’s former disciple. His remarks on
education are based very largely, although he makes no acknowledgment, on
his master’s teaching and scarcely harmonise with his own views on women.
The concluding sentences of the first book, for example, are distinctly
Platonic in their tone:

    The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, their
    several virtues, what in their intercourse with one another
    is good and what is evil, and how we may pursue the good and
    escape the evil, will have to be discussed when we speak of the
    different forms of government. For inasmuch as every family is
    a part of a State, and these relationships are the parts of a
    family, the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue
    of the whole. And therefore women and children must be trained
    by education with an eye to the State, if the virtues of either
    of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of
    the State. And they must make a difference; for the children
    grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a State
    are women.

So in discussing the Spartan constitution he says:

    A husband and a wife being each a part of every family, the
    State may be considered as about equally divided into men and
    women: and, therefore, in those States where the condition of
    the women is bad, half the city may be regarded as having no
    laws[9]—

a sentiment taken, with a slight difference of application, directly from
Plato himself, and the Platonic influence is plainly seen in all the
chapters which treat of marriage and education:

    Since the legislator should begin by considering how the frames
    of the children whom he is rearing may be as good as possible,
    his first care will be about marriage, at what age should his
    citizens marry, and who are fit to marry.

So the discussion starts reasonably enough, but the conclusion hardly
agrees with modern ideas of eugenics:

    Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age,
    and men at seven-and-thirty; then they are in the prime of
    life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.
    Furthermore, the children, if their birth takes place at the
    time that may reasonably be expected, will succeed in their
    prime, when the fathers are already in the decline of life and
    have nearly reached their term of three-scores years and ten.

Aristotle here seems to be following not any ideal system, but the actual
practice of his time, a practice which Euripides (fr. 319) had already
condemned. The gap in age between husband and wife is far too great
for any real physical or moral companionship. The husband, moreover,
remaining unmarried until the age of thirty-seven, can hardly be supposed
to have escaped from the illicit connections which were allowed and
encouraged by Athenian custom: to say that such an one is in his prime
is surely to mis-state the case. The art of being a grandfather also
under this system tends to disappear, for a man could hardly hope to see
grandchildren of his own, if neither he nor his sons married till they
were thirty-seven: his daughters, of course, as Euripides again tells
us (fr. 320), on marriage passed altogether out of their father’s life.
The whole arrangement is obviously wrong, but it suited the conditions
of Athenian domestic life, where a young wife could be more easily kept
in subjection and large families were neither desired nor customary; and
because it existed, therefore to Aristotle it seemed right.

The female, found to be inferior in a moral and political sense, is also
considered by Aristotle to be physically inferior to the male, and in the
treatise _On Generation_ he deals with this question frequently and at
some length:

    Male and female differ in their essence by each having a
    separate ability or faculty, and anatomically by certain parts;
    essentially the male is that which is able to generate in
    another, the female is that which is able to generate in itself
    and out of which comes into being the offspring previously
    existing in the parent.[10]

The distinction of sex is a first principle:

    An animal is not male or female in virtue of an isolated part
    or an isolated faculty: when that which distinguishes male and
    female suffers change many other changes accompany it, as would
    be the case if a first principle is changed.[11]

The treatise is concerned chiefly with the phenomena of reproduction:

    For the business of most animals is, you may say, nothing else
    than to produce young, as the business of a plant is to produce
    seed and fruit.[12]

Sex-characteristics accordingly are described mainly in accordance with
their reproductive functions.

As regards the origin of sex and the causes of male and female,
Aristotle is a curious mixture of prejudice and insight. He begins thus:

    To suppose that heat and cold are the causes of male and
    female, or that the different sexes come from the right and
    left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself, for the right
    of the body is hotter than the left.

With him it is an unquestioning belief that the right is, in nature,
superior to the left, the upper to the lower, the front to the back; and
nature, when no more important purpose stands in the way, places the more
honourable part in the more honourable position. So it is that the heart,
which is the nobler organ, is in the upper part of the body, while the
stomach is in the lower. As he is equally sure that the male is superior
to the female, the male elements in reproduction will come from the right
or noble part of the body.

But the part taken by the male and female elements in the process of
generation is, according to Aristotle, absolutely different. The child
is not formed from a mixture of both, but the female contributes the
material, the male is the active agent. The analogy used is that of a
bed: the female is the wood, the male the carpenter, who, from the wood,
makes the bed. The female is passive, the male is active:

    It is through a certain incapacity that the female is female:
    females are weaker and colder in nature than males, and we
    must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural
    deficiency.[13]

Women, in Aristotle’s view, are rather plants than animals; for the
animal differs from the plant, chiefly in having sense-perception. If the
sensitive soul is not present, the body is no better than a corpse, and
this sensitive soul is supplied only by the male. The female provides the
material, the male fashions it; the body is from the female, the soul
from the male, who can stand outside the body just as the artist stands
outside his creation. It certainly seems that female children progress
more quickly than male, but that is merely a proof of their inferiority;
for all inferior things come sooner to their perfection or end, and as
this is true of works of art so it is true of what is formed by nature.

These quotations will illustrate that curious depreciation of the female
element in nature and especially in man which is one of the weaker points
in the treatise. It is continually recurring; for example, in describing
the hair of animals these are the reasons given for baldness:

    The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there
    and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is
    much the largest and moistest. _Women do not go bald._[14]

So in the discussion of voice we read:

    The voice of the female is higher than that of the male in all
    animals, and in man this is especially noticeable. A deep note
    is _better_ than a high pitched: depth belongs to the nobler
    nature, and depth of tone shows a sort of superiority.[15]

Nor is this view of the physical, and consequently the mental,
inferiority of the female confined to the _De Generatione_: it permeates
the _History of Animals_, and finds its clearest expression there in a
passage which perhaps gives the ultimate reason of Aristotle’s error:

    In all genera in which the distinction of male and female is
    found, Nature makes a similar differentiation in the mental
    characteristics of the two sexes. This differentiation is the
    most obvious in the case of human-kind and in that of the
    larger animals and the viviparous quadrupeds. In the case of
    these latter the female is softer in character, is the sooner
    tamed, admits more readily of caressing, and is more apt in
    the way of learning. With all animals, except the bear and the
    leopard, the female is softer in disposition than the male,
    is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more
    attentive to the nurture of the young. The traces of these
    differentiated characteristics are more or less visible in
    every species, but they are especially visible where character
    is the more developed, and most of all in man. The fact is,
    the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete, and
    consequently in man the qualities above referred to are found
    in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate
    than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is
    more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold. She is,
    furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than
    the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of
    speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is
    also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to
    action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.[16]

The Athenian women of the fourth century were the women that Aristotle
knew best, and, given Aristotle’s character and scientific method, it
is not surprising that he should judge Woman in the abstract to be an
inferior animal. If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist—in
other words, if he had not been Aristotle—he might have taken another
view; but considering the facts of Athenian life in his day, and
Aristotle’s disposition to cling to facts, we need not wonder at his
estimate. The real mischief—and Aristotle’s influence in this matter
has been an enormous hindrance to human progress—was done not by the
philosopher himself, for in his time the position of women could hardly
have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages
when his slightest word was regarded almost as inspired truth. Aristotle
himself is never dogmatic (he leaves that to weaker men), and does not
profess to give anything but the somewhat casual expression of his own
personal knowledge and opinions.

It is hardly right to blame him: women in his time undoubtedly were the
inferior sex, and Aristotle is always the prophet of things as they
are. The _protégé_ of the absolute monarchy which had overthrown the
city-states, he has no belief in abstract freedom or in social reform.
For him, what is is right. ‘Women and slaves are inferior,’ he says to
himself, ‘by the conditions of existence as I see them: _therefore_ they
are inferior by the laws of nature,’ and although he knows that this
inferiority was the result of the conditions of their life, his business
is only with facts.

But he generalises from insufficient data: Woman for him means the women
of his time, and although he points out the influence of environment, he
fails to distinguish between innate and accidental characteristics. And
so again, in treating of the female sex in nature, he is too inclined
to confine himself to the higher mammals. He emphasises the case of the
herbivorous animals, those that go in herds, and are polygamous in their
habits: deer, for example, where the male has a distinct advantage in
size and strength; while he says little of the carnivora, who hunt in
pairs and are monogamous, where the female tends to be equal in every
respect to the male. Insects he almost disregards, and the microscope,
in the hands of a naturalist of genius like M. Fabre, has opened up for
us a world from which Aristotle was debarred by the material limitations
of his instruments.

We see now that Nature, at least, has no favoured sex, and that
Euripides’ words are as true in a zoological as they are in a
sociological sense: ‘All that can be said of the male can be said equally
well of the female, and _vice versa_.’ The male that in some species
is the stronger and more active, in others is the weaker and plays a
passive rôle. The female mantis that devours her feeble mate is the
reverse side of Nature’s picture. So again, all the fascinating problems
of parthenogenesis, whereby the female may produce for several births
without the intervention of the male, have received a new light from the
close study of the hive. Aristotle’s chapter on bees suffers materially
from lack of first-hand knowledge, and, as Professor Platt says, although
it is greatly to his credit for hard thinking, it reveals the fact that
he knew next to nothing about the subject. Of course, the whole method
of bee-generation is totally at variance with Aristotle’s theory of male
superiority, and if he had possessed our knowledge his theory might have
been modified. In the world of insects, at least, feminism reigns; the
male is weak and subservient, the female is the ruler. Often the male
is an accident; the female would have sufficed. So true is this that
a modern essayist, M. Remy de Gourmont, writing under the influence
of Fabre’s discoveries, can vary Aristotle’s analogy and compare the
female to the clock and the male to the necessary key that winds up the
mechanism.

But although Aristotle can scarcely be said to understand all the
mysteries of sex, he anticipates some of the most fruitful investigations
of modern research, and in all questions of pure science, within the
limits of his own experience, he is almost infallible. It is unfortunate
that his experience of women was misleading, and that the problems of
feminism do not always fall within the confines of science. That he was
wrong in this matter is chiefly the fault of his times and their social
conditions, and those who live in other days and amid other surroundings
should remember his own significant words, spoken indeed about bees, but
equally applicable to other social animals:

    Such appears to me to be the truth, judging from theory and
    what I believe to be the facts. But up to the present the facts
    have not been sufficiently comprehended; if ever they are, then
    credit must be given to observation rather than to theories,
    and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with observed
    facts.

And with that quotation we may well leave him: _Amicus Aristoteles; magis
amica veritas_. If the facts of modern existence show women to be the
inferior sex, then, and then only, are we moderns justified in holding
that opinion. But every man should judge for himself on the evidence that
his own observation gives, and not be influenced by the theories of other
men or by the literature of the past.

In Aristotle’s time, for reasons which this brief survey of Greek
literature has, perhaps, made plain, the facts of women’s nature were
certainly not sufficiently comprehended. Euripides and Plato are almost
the only authors who show any true appreciation of a woman’s real
qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of
his prejudices, was opposed. His mistake was that he failed to realise
the moral aspects of feminism. A nation that degrades its women will
inevitably suffer degradation itself. Aristotle lent the weight of his
name to a profound error, and helped to perpetuate the malady which had
already been the chief cause of the destruction of Greece.




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Ethics_, vii. 7.

[2] _Ibid._ vii. 6.

[3] _Ethics_, iv. 15.

[4] _Ibid._ iv. 9.

[5] _Rhet._ A. v. 6.

[6] _Ethics_, viii. 8.

[7] _Ibid_, viii. 12.

[8] _Ethics_, viii. 8.

[9] _Politics_, 2, 9.

[10] _De Generatione_, 716, a, 18.

[11] _Ibid._ 716, b. 10.

[12] _Ibid._ 717, a, 20.

[13] _De Generatione_, 728 a.

[14] _Ibid_, 784, a.

[15] _De Generatione_, 787, a.

[16] _Hist. An._, 608, b (trans. Thompson).


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