Romantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent on
sexual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love are
possible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiary
sexual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now the
Spartans, besides maintaining all the love-suppressing customs just
alluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their women
into Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as were
absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of the
avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was
to destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty. The law which
forbade husbands to associate with their wives in the daytime
prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment
between husband and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far
as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if
their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in
case of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutions
relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the
purpose of supplying the state with warriors. Not love, but
patriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions. To
patriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of these
women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were
reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Brought
up as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, when
they wanted companionship, always sought it in association with
comrades of their own sex. In a word, instead of honoring the female
sex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought on
their own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairs
at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and
sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African
Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands
too.
And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the
Amazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate
man--has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and
progress!
"If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were
taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not
your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides,
thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one
other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Müller
alludes to it in the following (II., 304):
"Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they
involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as
Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of
Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of
Agis."
This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all
other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be
compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and
courage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears to
have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that
"each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"
yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more
than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste
housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to
man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have
liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to the
end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of
Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On
the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues
of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of
heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.
Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.
Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latin
names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are
Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,
as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly
marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on its
higher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that
"she is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of sex except the
gender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the goddess,
among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting and
slaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin but
ascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness--as unsympathetic a
being as was ever conceived by human imagination--as unnatural and
ludicrous as her devotee, the Hippolytus of Euripides. She is the
Amazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of course
she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the
question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their
ultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, for
example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle _(Eth. Nicom_., IV., 7),
[Greek: to kallos en megalo somati, hoi mikroi d' asteioi kai
summetroi, kaloi d' ou.]--"beauty consists in a large body; the petite
are pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."[311]