Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we
examine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, we
find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially
in Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respect
Athens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestled
naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted to
witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions
about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused
the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the
Athenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these
words:
"Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife,
leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth
the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No!
a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would,
who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her
robe float free, to share with youth their races and
their sports--customs I cannot away with. Is it any
wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue?"
The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spartan educate
his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by
locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the
Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he
knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery
that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness
America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of
Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans
because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less
masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them
because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the
education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few
Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such
accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long
imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a
woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]
Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the
Spartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. The
girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind
they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in
the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in
the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women
for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for
the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai
for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III.,
337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of
Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was
always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a
sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."