WOMAN IN ANCIENT GREECE
IT is not necessary, and it would be much more difficult, to make a
minute inquiry into the other civilisations that sprang up, before
the Christian era, in that remarkable tract of Asia that lies
between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Their lesser power
and shorter life have left them in the shade of the greatness of
Egypt and Assyria. One only of them was destined, in an indirect
way, to have a momentous influence on woman's position in
civilisation; but it will be convenient to notice the Jews when
their ideas are embodied in Christianity and begin to mould Europe.
There was a striking lack of uniformity in the various tribes that
were struggling upward in that western offshoot of Asia. The
Phenicians are (somewhat precariously) linked with the Egyptians,
but do not seem to have granted their women anything like the same
independence. The Sumerians (or oldest Babylonians) are connected
with the Mongols, yet gave woman an excellent position. The Jews
were Semites, like the later Babylonians, yet began an ominous
tradition of contempt for woman.
Only one of these West-Asiatic civilisations is known to us with any
fulness; but this also was monarchical, and neither men nor women
(save the privileged few) had any political power. Ancient Persia
was the fourth world-power to issue from the chaos of tribes and
build on the ruins of its predecessors. If we trust the Greek
writers, the position of woman in Persia varied very considerably.
It is suggested that she was oppressed in the western parts, where
the religion of Zoroaster had less influence, and respected in the
eastern. The poorer women had the liberty that their poverty
generally entails, but the women of the wealthier had enclosed
chambers and guarding eunuchs. The monarchs and princes had large
harems, and their women at times won the irregular and blood-stained
power that the system often gives them. The Persian sacred book, the
Avesta, contains the best feeling of the country. A man must have
the woman's consent to marriage, must respect her after marriage,
and must only in an exceptional case take a second wife; but _her_
duty is to obey, and she is treated with the usual unfairness in
regard to divorce and misconduct.
The short sway of Persia, however, soon fell before invaders from
Europe, who bring us to the interesting story of woman's position
in Greece. Here we at once enter an atmosphere much nearer to our
own than that of the older civilisations, and the tendency to see
parallels and to draw morals becomes very strong. With the general
statement that woman was emphatically subordinated to man in the
chief centre of Greek civilisation, at Athens, and that there arose
in time a contest of feminists and anti-feminists to which we may
liken our familiar struggle, all are now familiar. But we must trace
the evolution of woman's position with some care, if we are to
understand it aright.
Letourneau (_La condition de la femme_) and Otto Henne am Rhyn
(_Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte_) have collected many
indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of
Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early
date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central
place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later
writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote
in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the
men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god,
Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these
and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so
"subordinate" when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who
observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called
"matriotism," gives the best suggestion of the way in which they
lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men
shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman
fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer
realisation of the father's part in the children aided this. In
time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively
nurtures the seed. The father is the creator.
I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early
Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of
goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to
it, because we do not find woman's position varying with the
number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps,
there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were
originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were
always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and
daughter goddesses, whatever woman's position in the tribe was.
Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks
began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the
political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the
golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life,
but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and
contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly
true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and
great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position
was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in
the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough
democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman
was one of subordination.
A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (_La
femme dans l'antiquité Grecque_, 1901), in which he essays to
vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians
restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated
her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual,
of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and
the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember,
however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives
of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women
are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the
earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly
respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only
correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason
(_Woman in the Golden Ages_, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek
woman was "bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that
tempers the hardest fate."
That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two
greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no
harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like
Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern
Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights.
As it was, her life was by no means "cheerless." Until she
approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year)
an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not,
as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense,
nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the
incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent
spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and
the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage
she was restricted to the _gynecæum_, or women's quarters. One
must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that
inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so
rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long
hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered
terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or
friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and
dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too,
the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious
solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the
hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that
roared at the comedy or seethed round the _bema_, were not lit up
by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes
and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the
monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the
journey to the Olympic games.
This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do
Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their
shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more
part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and
Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of
them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised
them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a
contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than
in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really
show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and
irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and
that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary
exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day.
This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for
establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its
splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of
Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern
isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and
education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their
strictures on woman's intelligence, that where, among their own
kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved
their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho
we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough
to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time.
Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with
calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are
unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of
able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all
parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There
are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition,
and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However,
the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world,
and the fire dwindled and died.
The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other
changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of
restriction. One of these was the rise of the class of _hetæræ_
and the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the
higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to
marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to
confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud.
Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of
prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more
select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom
even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and
daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men
flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their
less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed
chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run
swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division
cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous
of the _hetæræ_, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of
woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that
led the Athenians to put her on trial.
It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition
began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from
natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current
ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women
among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere
and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his
wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same
regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife
Hipparchia to think. Epicurus--who was not the hedonist so many
imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher--opened his quiet
garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and
water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this
only an admission of woman's equal capacity for culture and demand
for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there
was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the
great writers expressly consider it.
Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are
sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women;
but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious
fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for
centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband.
Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their
vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted
woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle,
or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.
But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of
his race. He saw plainly--what we might have expected the more
scientific Aristotle to see--that woman's frailer power of
reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the
inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato
as saying that "the female sex is inferior to the male," and
represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the
mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical
conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only,
and not on women, and he presently adds: "The same education which
makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good
guardian, for their original nature is the same."[5] There are
differences between men and women, but he says that these
differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the
question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for
mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so
solid is his conviction of woman's capacity. In a word, one of the
greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all
literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed.
What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece
lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy
hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the
great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists
was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade
both men and women turn from such political life as was left in
Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the
moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era),
held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time
had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of
woman's position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia
in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find
the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little
significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in
diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting
to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of
Hypatia--not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley
has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia
of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in
the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria.
In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed
to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and,
much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and
restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman's
position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the
spacious tomb of old empires.
Greece had run the normal course that I have traced for the earlier
powers. In its pre-civilised stage its men and women seem to have
stood on a common level, with the military rulers over all. As it
advances from the gloom into the lit territory of history, we find
that the men have asserted a crude supremacy in private as well as
public life. In this Greece differed from Egypt and Assyria, and a
proportionately keener struggle set in. We find many traces of that
struggle from the moment when Greece reaches its height of culture;
and the intense pre-occupation with moral problems, which begins
with Socrates, culminates in the extraordinary feminism of Plato's
_Republic_. The movement increases as culture rises. But decay has
set in, from a variety of causes, and the problems of civilisation
are cast on other shoulders. I do not suppose that even the most
determined of anti-feminists will venture to connect the decay of
Athens with the stirring of its women. The causes have been too
often and too clearly traced. The cry of the Athenian feminists dies
away because the frame of the superb city is palsied and beset.
Another vigorous race fills the stage of the world, and we pass over
to Italy for the next phase in the development of woman's
position.