Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
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.