face, and given vent to mourning and lamentations. But she does not seek
death, nor surrender herself to grief, nor court despair. She renews her
strength. She reserves her arts for another victim. She hopes to win
Octavius as she had won Julius and Antony; for she was only thirty-nine,
and still a queen. And for what? That she might retain her own
sovereignty, or the independence of Egypt,--still the most fertile of
countries, rich, splendid, and with grand traditions which went back
thousands of years; the oldest, and once the most powerful of
monarchies. _Her_ love was ever subservient to her interests. Antony
gave up ambition for love,--whatever that love was. It took possession
of his whole being, not pure and tender, but powerful, strange;
doubtless a mad infatuation, and perhaps something more, since it never
passed away,--admiration allied with desire, the worship of dazzling
gifts, though not of moral virtues. Would such a love have been
permanent? Probably not, since the object of it did not shine in the
beauty of the soul, but rather in the graces and adornments of the body,
intensified indeed by the lustre of bewitching social qualities and the
brightness of a cultivated intellect. It is hard to analyze a passionate
love between highly gifted people who have an intense development of
both the higher and the lower natures, and still more difficult when the
idol is a Venus Polyhymnia rather than a Venus Urania. But the love of
Antony, whether unwise, or mysterious, or unfortunate, was not feigned
or forced: it was real, and it was irresistible; he could not help it.
He was enslaved, bound hand and foot. His reason may have rallied to his
support, but his will was fettered. He may have had at times dark and
gloomy suspicions,--that he was played with, that he was cheated, that
he would be deserted, that Cleopatra was false and treacherous. And yet
she reigned over him; he could not live without her. She was all in all
to him, so long as the infatuation lasted; and it had lasted fourteen
years, with increasing force, in spite of duty and pressing labors, the
calls of ambition and the lust of power. In this consuming and abandoned
passion, for fourteen years,--so strange and inglorious, and for a woman
so unworthy, even if he were no better than she,--we see one of the
great mysteries of our complex nature, not uncommon, but insoluble.
I have no respect for Antony, and but little admiration. I speak of such
mad infatuation as a humiliating exhibition of human weakness. Any one
under its fearful spell is an object of pity. But I have more sympathy
for him than for Cleopatra, although she was doubtless a very gifted
woman. He was her victim; she was not his. If extravagant and reckless
and sensual, he was frank, generous, eloquent, brave, and true to her.
She was artful, designing, and selfish, and used him for her own ends,
although we do not know that she was perfidious and false to him. But
for her he would have ruled the world. He showed himself capable of an
enormous sacrifice. She made no sacrifices for him. She could even have
transferred her affections, since she afterwards sought to play her
blandishments upon his rival. Conceive of Antony, if you can, as loving
any one else than her who led him on to ruin. In the very degradation
of love we see its sacredness. In his fidelity we find some palliation.
Nor does it seem that Octavia, the slighted wife of Antony, gave way to
vengeance. Her sense of injury was overshadowed by her pity. This lofty
and dignified matron even took his six surviving children, three of whom
were Cleopatra's, and brought them up in her own house as her own. Can
Paganism show a greater magnanimity?
The fate of Cleopatra was tragic also. She too destroyed herself, not
probably by the bite of asps, as is the popular opinion, but by some
potent and subtile poison that she ever carried with her, and which had
the effect of benumbing the body and making her insensible to pain. Yet
she does not kill herself because she cannot survive the death of
Antony, but because she is too proud to be carried to Rome to grace the
triumph of the new Caesar. She will not be led a captive princess up the
Capitoline Hill. She has an overbearing pride. "Know, sir," says she to
Proculeius, "that I
"Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia....
... Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave to me!"
But whether pride or whether shame was the more powerful motive in
committing suicide, I do not read that she was a victim of remorse. She
had no moral sense. Nor did she give way to sentimental grief on the
death of Antony. Her grief was blended with disappointment and rage. Nor
did she hide her head, but wore a face of brass. She used all her arts
to win Octavius. Her resources did not fail her; but she expended them
on one of the coldest, most politic, and most astute men that ever
lived. And the disappointment that followed her defeat--that she could
not enslave another conqueror--was greater than the grief for Antony.
Nor during her whole career do we see any signs of that sorrow and
humility which, it would seem, should mark a woman who has made so great
and fatal a mistake,--cut off hopelessly from the respect of the world
and the peace of her own soul. We see grief, rage, despair, in her
miserable end, as we see pride and shamefacedness in her gilded life,
but not remorse or shame. And when she dies by her own hand, it is not
in madness, but to escape humiliation. Suicide was one of the worst
features of Pagan antiquity. It was a base and cowardly reluctance to
meet the evils of life, as much as indifference to the future and a
blunted moral sense.
So much for the woman herself, her selfish spirit, her vile career; but
as Cleopatra is one of the best known and most striking examples of a
Pagan woman, with qualities and in circumstances peculiarly
characteristic of Paganism, I must make a few remarks on these points.
One of the most noticeable of these is that immorality seems to have
been no bar to social position. Some of those who were most attractive
and sought after were notoriously immoral. Aspasia, whom Socrates and
Pericles equally admired, and whose house was the resort of poets,
philosophers, statesmen, and artists, and who is said to have been one
of the most cultivated women of antiquity, bore a sullied name. Sappho,
who was ever exalted by Grecian poets for the sweetness of her verses,
attempted to reconcile a life of pleasure with a life of letters, and
threw herself into the sea because of a disappointed passion. Lais, a
professional courtesan, was the associate of kings and sages as well as
the idol of poets and priests. Agrippina, whose very name is infamy, was
the admiration of courtiers and statesmen. Lucilla, who armed her
assassins against her own brother, seems to have ruled the court of
Marcus Aurelius.
And all these women, and more who could be mentioned, were--like
Cleopatra--cultivated, intellectual, and brilliant. They seem to have
reigned for their social fascinations as much as by their physical
beauty. Hence, that class of women who with us are shunned and excluded
from society were not only flattered and honored, but the class itself
seems to have been recruited by those who were the most attractive for
their intellectual gifts as well as for physical beauty. No woman, if
bright, witty, and beautiful, was avoided because she was immoral. It
was the immoral women who often aspired to the highest culture. They
sought to reign by making their homes attractive to distinguished men.
Their houses seem to have been what the _salons_ of noble and
fascinating duchesses were in France in the last two centuries. The
homes of virtuous and domestic women were dull and wearisome. In fact,
the modest wives and daughters of most men were confined to monotonous
domestic duties; they were household slaves; they saw but little of what
we now call society. I do not say that virtue was not held in honor. I
know of no age, however corrupt, when it was not prized by husbands and
fathers. I know of no age when virtuous women did not shine at home, and
exert a healthful influence upon men, and secure the proud regard of
their husbands. But these were not the women whose society was most
sought. The drudgeries and slaveries of domestic life among the ancients
made women unattractive to the world. The women who were most attractive
were those who gave or attended sumptuous banquets, and indulged in
pleasures that were demoralizing. Not domestic women, but bright women,
carried away those prizes which turned the brain. Those who shone were
those that attached themselves to men through their senses, and
possibly through their intellects, and who were themselves strong in
proportion as men were weak. For a woman to appear in public assemblies
with braided and decorated hair and ostentatious dress, and especially
if she displayed any gifts of eloquence or culture, was to proclaim
herself one of the immoral, leisurely, educated, dissolute class. This
gives point to Saint Paul's strict injunctions to the women of Corinth
to dress soberly, to keep silence in the assemblies, etc. The modest
woman was to "be in subjection." Those Pagan converts to the "New Way"
were to avoid even the appearance of evil.
Thus under Paganism the general influence of women was to pull men down
rather than to elevate them, especially those who were attractive in
society. Virtuous and domestic women were not sufficiently educated to
have much influence except in a narrow circle. Even they, in a social
point of view, were slaves. They could be given in marriage without
their consent; they were restricted in their intercourse with men; they
were confined to their homes; they had but few privileges; they had no
books; they led a life of terror from the caprices of their lords and
masters, and hence inspired no veneration. The wives and daughters of
the rich tyrannized over their servants, decked themselves with costly
ornaments, and were merely gilded toys, whose society was vapid and
uninteresting. The wives and daughters of the poor were drudges and
menials, without attraction or influence; noisy, quarrelsome, garrulous
women, who said the least when they talked the most.
Hence under Paganism home had none of those attractions which, in
Christian countries, invest it with such charms. The home of the poor
was squalid and repulsive; the home of the rich was gaudy and tinselled
enough, but was dull and uninspiring. What is home when women are
ignorant, stupid, and slavish? What glitter or artistic splendor can
make home attractive when women are mere butterflies or slaves with
gilded fetters? Deprive women of education, and especially of that
respect which Christian chivalry inspires, and they cannot rise to be
the equal companions of men. They are simply their victims or their
slaves. What is a home where women are treated as inferiors? Paganism
never recognized their equality with men; and if they ever ruled men, it
was by appealing to their lower qualities, or resorting to arts and
devices which are subversive of all dignity of character. When their
personal beauty fled, their power also departed. A faded or homely
woman, without intelligence or wit, was a forlorn object in a Pagan
home,--to be avoided, derided, despised,--a melancholy object of pity or
neglect, so far as companionship goes. She may have been valued as a
cook or drudge, but she was only a menial. Of all those sins of omission
of which Paganism is accused, the worst was that it gave to women no
mental resources to assist them in poverty, or neglect, or isolation,
when beauty or fortune deserted them. No home can be attractive where
women have no resources; and women can have no resources outside of
domestic duties, unless educated to some art or something calculated to
draw out their energies and higher faculties by which they win the
respect and admiration, not of men only, but of their own sex.
It was this lack of education which Paganism withheld from women which
not only destroyed the radiance of home, but which really made women
inferior to men. All writers, poets, and satirists alike speak of the
inferiority of women to men,--not physically only, but even
intellectually; and some authors made them more vicious than men in
natural inclination. And when the mind was both neglected and
undervalued, how could respect and admiration be kindled, or continue
after sensual charms had passed away? Paganism taught the inequality of
the sexes, and produced it; and when this inequality is taught, or
believed in, or insisted upon, then farewell to the glory of homes, to
all unbought charms, to the graces of domestic life, to everything that
gilds our brief existence with the radiance of imperishable joy.
Nor did Paganism offer any consolations to the down-trodden, injured,
neglected, uninteresting woman of antiquity. She could not rise above
the condition in which she was born. No sympathetic priest directed her
thoughts to another and higher and endless life. Nobody wiped away her
tears; nobody gave encouragement to those visions of beauty and serenity
for which the burdened spirit will, under any oppressions, sometimes
aspire to enjoy. No one told her of immortality and a God of
forgiveness, who binds up the bleeding heart and promises a future peace
and bliss. Paganism was merciful only in this,--that it did not open
wounds it could not heal; that it did not hold out hopes and promises it
could not fulfil; that it did not remind the afflicted of miseries from
which they could not rise; that it did not let in a vision of glories
which could never be enjoyed; that it did not provoke the soul to
indulge in a bitterness in view of evils for which there was no remedy;
that it did not educate the mind for enjoyments which could never be
reached; that it did not kindle a discontent with a condition from which
there is no escape. If one cannot rise above debasement or misery, there
is no use in pointing it out. If the Pagan woman was not seemingly aware
of the degradation which kept her down, and from which it was impossible
to rise, Paganism did not add stings to her misery by presenting it as
an accident which it was easy to surmount. There would be no
contentment or submission among animals if they were endowed with the
reason of men. Give to a healthy, but ignorant, coarse, uncultivated
country girl, surrounded only with pigs and chickens, almost without
neighbors, a glimpse of the glories of cities, the wonders of art, the
charms of social life, the triumphs of mind, the capacities of the soul,
and would she be any happier, if obliged to remain for life in her
rustic obscurity and labor, and with no possible chance of improving her
condition? Such was woman under Paganism. She could rise only so far as
men lifted her up; and they lifted her up only further to consummate her
degradation.
But there was another thing which kept women in degradation. Paganism
did not recognize the immaterial and immortal soul: it only had regard
to the wants of the body. Of course there were exceptions. There were
sages and philosophers among the men who speculated on the grandest
subjects which can elevate the mind to the regions of immortal
truth,--like Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,--even as there
were women who rose above all the vile temptations which surrounded
them, and were poets, heroines, and benefactors,--like Telessa, who
saved Argos by her courage; and Volumnia, who screened Rome from the
vengeance of her angry son; and Lucretia, who destroyed herself rather
than survive the dishonor of her house. There are some people who rise
and triumph over every kind of oppression and injury. Under Paganism
there was the possibility of the emancipation of the soul, but not the
probability. Its genius was directed to the welfare of the body,--to
utilitarian ends of life, to ornaments and riches, to luxury and
voluptuousness, to the pleasures which are brief, to the charms of
physical beauty and grace. It could stimulate ambition and inculcate
patriotism and sing of love, if it coupled the praises of Venus with the
praises of wine. But everything it praised or honored had reference to
this life and to the mortal body. It may have recognized the mind, but
not the soul, which is greater than the mind. It had no aspirations for
future happiness; it had no fears of future misery. Hence the frequency
of suicide under disappointment, or ennui, or satiated desire, or fear
of poverty, or disgrace, or pain.
And thus, as Paganism did not take cognizance of the soul in its future
existence, it disregarded man's highest aspirations. It did not
cultivate his graces; it set but a slight value on moral beauty; it
thought little of affections; it spurned gentleness and passive virtues;
it saw no lustre in the tender eye; it heard no music in the tones of
sympathy; it was hard and cold. That which constitutes the richest
beatitudes of love it could not see, and did not care for. Ethereal
blessedness it despised. That which raises woman highest, it was
indifferent to. The cold atmosphere of Paganism froze her soul, and made
her callous to wrongs and sufferings. It destroyed enthusiasm and poetic
ardor and the graces which shine in misfortune. Woman was not kindled by
lofty sentiments, since no one believed in them. The harmonies of home
had no poetry and no inspiration, and they disappeared. The face of
woman was not lighted by supernatural smiles. Her caresses had no
spiritual fervor, and her benedictions were unmeaning platitudes. Take
away the soul of woman, and what is she? Rob her of her divine
enthusiasm, and how vapid and commonplace she becomes! Destroy her
yearnings to be a spiritual solace, and how limited is her sphere! Take
away the holy dignity of the soul, and how impossible is a lofty
friendship! Without the amenities of the soul there can be no real
society. Crush the soul of a woman, and you extinguish her life, and
shed darkness on all who surround her. She cannot rally from pain, or
labor, or misfortune, if her higher nature is ignored. Paganism ignored
what is grandest and truest in a woman, and she withered like a stricken
tree. She succumbed before the cold blasts that froze her noblest
impulses, and sunk sullenly into obscurity. Oh, what a fool a man is to
make woman a slave! He forgets that though he may succeed in keeping her
down, chained and fettered by drudgeries, she will be revenged; that
though powerless, she will instinctively learn to hate him; and if she
cannot defy him she will scorn him,--for not even a brute animal will
patiently submit to cruelty, still less a human soul become reconciled
to injustice. And what is the possession of a human body without the
sympathy of a living soul?
And hence women, under Paganism,--having no hopes of future joy, no
recognition of their diviner attributes, no true scope for energies, no
field of usefulness but in a dreary home, no ennobling friendships, no
high encouragements, no education, no lofty companionship; utterly
unappreciated in what most distinguishes them, and valued only as
household slaves or victims of guilty pleasure; adorned and bedecked
with trinkets, all to show off the graces of the body alone, and with
nothing to show their proud equality with men in influence, if not in
power, in mind as well as heart,--took no interest in what truly
elevates society. What schools did they teach or even visit? What
hospitals did they enrich? What miseries did they relieve? What
charities did they contribute to? What churches did they attend? What
social gatherings did they enliven? What missions of benevolence did
they embark in? What were these to women who did not know what was the
most precious thing they had, or when this precious thing was allowed to
run to waste? What was there for a woman to do with an unrecognized
soul but gird herself with ornaments, and curiously braid her hair, and
ransack shops for new cosmetics, and hunt for new perfumes, and recline
on luxurious couches, and issue orders to attendant slaves, and join in
seductive dances, and indulge in frivolous gossip, and entice by the
display of sensual charms? Her highest aspiration was to adorn a
perishable body, and vanity became the spring of life.
And the men,--without the true sanctities and beatitudes of married
life, without the tender companionship which cultivated women give,
without the hallowed friendships which the soul alone can keep alive,
despising women who were either toys or slaves,--fled from their dull,
monotonous, and dreary homes to the circus and the theatre and the
banqueting hall for excitement or self-forgetfulness. They did not seek
society, for there can be no high society where women do not preside and
inspire and guide. Society is a Christian institution. It was born among
our German ancestors, amid the inspiring glories of chivalry. It was
made for women as well as men of social cravings and aspirations, which
have their seat in what Paganism ignored. Society, under Paganism, was
confined to men, at banquets or symposia, where women seldom entered,
unless for the amusement of men,--never for their improvement, and still
less for their restraint.
It was not until Christianity permeated the old Pagan civilization and
destroyed its idols, that the noble Paulas and Marcellas and Fabiolas
arose to dignify human friendships, and give fascination to reunions of
cultivated women and gifted men; that the seeds of society were sown. It
was not until the natural veneration which the Gothic nations seem to
have had for women, even in their native forests, had ripened into
devotion and gallantry under the teachings of Christian priests, that
the true position of women was understood. And after their equality was
recognized in the feudal castles of the Middle Ages, the _salons_ of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established their claims as the
inspiring geniuses of what we call society. Then, and not till then, did
physical beauty pale before the brilliancy of the mind and the radiance
of the soul,--at last recognized as the highest charm of woman. The
leaders of society became, not the ornamented and painted _heterae_
which had attracted Grecian generals and statesmen and men of letters,
but the witty and the genial and the dignified matrons who were capable
of instructing and inspiring men superior to themselves, with eyes
beaming with intellectual radiance, and features changing with perpetual
variety. Modern society, created by Christianity,--since only
Christianity recognizes what is most truly attractive and ennobling
among women--is a great advance over the banquets of imperial Romans
and the symposia of gifted Greeks.
But even this does not satisfy woman in her loftiest aspirations. The
soul which animates and inspires her is boundless. Its wants cannot be
fully met even in an assemblage of wits and beauties. The soul of Madame
de Staël pined amid all her social triumphs. The soul craves
friendships, intellectual banquetings, and religious aspirations. And
unless the emancipated soul of woman can have these wants gratified, she
droops even amid the glories of society. She is killed, not as a hero
perishes on a battle-field; but she dies, as Madame de Maintenon said
that she died, amid the imposing splendors of Versailles. It is only the
teachings and influences of that divine religion which made Bethany the
centre of true social banquetings to the wandering and isolated Man of
Sorrows, which can keep the soul alive amid the cares, the burdens, and
the duties which bend down every son and daughter of Adam, however
gilded may be the outward life. How grateful, then, should women be to
that influence which has snatched them from the pollutions and heartless
slaveries of Paganism, and given dignity to their higher nature! It is
to them that it has brought the greatest boon, and made them triumphant
over the evils of life. And how thoughtless, how misguided, how
ungrateful is that woman who would exchange the priceless blessings
which Christianity has brought to her for those ornaments, those
excitements, and those pleasures which ancient Paganism gave as the only
solace fox the loss and degradation of her immortal soul!
* * * * *
AUTHORITIES.
Plutarch's Lives; Froude's Caesar; Shakspeare's Antony and Cleopatra;
Plato's Dialogues; Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, especially among the
poets; Lord's Old Roman World; Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars; Dion
Cassius; Rollin's Ancient History; Merivale's History of the Romans;
Biographic Universelle; Rees's Encyclopedia has a good article.
PAGAN SOCIETY.
GLORY AND SHAME.
50 B.C.
We have now surveyed what was most glorious in the States of antiquity.
We have seen a civilization which in many respects rivals all that
modern nations have to show. In art, in literature, in philosophy, in
laws, in the mechanism of government, in the cultivated face of Nature,
in military strength, in aesthetic culture, the Greeks and Romans were
our equals. And this high civilization was reached by the native and
unaided strength of man; by the power of will, by courage, by
perseverance, by genius, by fortunate circumstances. We are filled with
admiration by all these trophies of genius, and cannot but feel that
only superior races could have accomplished such mighty triumphs.