So far as we can gather from Homer, women of the better sort had a
degree of consideration in the heroic age which they lost at a later
period. When men fought or tilled the soil, it was in the natural
order of things that they should stay at home to look after their
children and households. The division of duties was fair enough. In a
reign of brute force they needed protection, and though it was pretty
well settled that men were born to rule and women to be ruled, there
was evidently a great deal of pleasant companionship in family life.
Compared with the seclusion of the Oriental harem, the position of
these women was one of freedom, and it lasted to historic times. Their
supreme distinction was a moral one. Books they had not. Of literature
nothing was known beyond the verses and tales of wandering minstrels.
Art was little more than a handicraft. If men worked in marble or in
metal, women designed patterns for weaving and embroidery. Men had
not begun to put their thoughts or speculations into enduring form,
and women were not excluded from a large part of their lives. But
so perfectly did many of them realize the world’s ideal of feminine
virtues that we ask no more. They stand upon pedestals, like the
masterpieces of Greek sculpture, noble in their simplicity and lovely
in the repose of their surpassing strength.
But the dramatists reflected in a thousand ways the altered spirit of
an age in which good women had no visible part. Their immortal heroines
are equally strong and instinct with vitality, though less simple and
of severer mold, but they are revered from afar as the goddesses were,
while real women are a target for abuse and ridicule. It is to no rare
and perishable beauty, no fleeting grace, no intellectual brilliancy,
that they owe their eternal charm, but to their moral greatness, their
strength of sacrifice. These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so
patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse destiny or of their
own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine
heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but
only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose
divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. She was made
to be loved, to command; all others were made to serve. The Greeks
adored beauty; they lived in it, they created it. Here lay their
pride; here more than once they found their Nemesis. But virtue they
gave a place apart, as they did the wise Athena, who towered in golden
isolation over the Attic divinities. It had no share in the joy of
existence.
Beneath the glad pæans of heroes we hear at intervals, across the ages,
the clear voices of women chanting a miserere in an undertone of sorrow
or despair. Doubtless the poets saw and felt the tragical side of their
lives, but tradition had the inevitability of fate, as it has had in
other times. They have given us great and lonely ideals of womanhood,
but a somber picture of the place held by living women in the Athenian
world.