CHAPTER V. THE POSITION OF WOMEN.

In the long series of moral revolutions that have been described in the

foregoing chapters, I have more than once had occasion to refer to the

position that was assigned to woman in the community, and to the virtues

and vices that spring directly from the relations of the sexes. I have

not, however, as yet discussed these questions with a fulness at all

corresponding to their historical importance, and I propose, in

consequence, before concluding this volume, to devote a few pages to their

examination. Of all the many questions that are treated in this work,

there is none which I approach with so much hesitation, for there is

probably none which it is so difficult to treat with clearness and

impartiality, and at the same time without exciting any scandal or

offence. The complexity of the problem, arising from the very large place

which exceptional institutions or circumstances, and especially the

influence of climate and race, have had on the chastity of nations, I have

already noticed, and the extreme delicacy of the matters with which this

branch of ethics is connected must be palpable to all. The first duty of

an historian, however, is to truth; and it is absolutely impossible to

present a true picture of the moral condition of different ages, and to

form a true estimate of the moral effects of different religions, without

adverting to the department of morals, which has exhibited most change,

and has probably exercised most influence.

It is natural that, in the period when men are still perfect barbarians,

when their habits of life are still nomadic, and when, war and the chase,

being their sole pursuits, the qualities that are required in these form

their chief measure of excellence, the inferiority of women to men should

be regarded as undoubted, and their position should be extremely degraded.

In all those qualities which are then most prized, women are indisputably

inferior. The social qualities in which they are especially fitted to

excel have no sphere for their display. The ascendancy of beauty is very

faint, and, even if it were otherwise, few traces of female beauty could

survive the hardships of the savage life. Woman is looked upon merely as

the slave of man, and as the minister to his passions. In the first

capacity, her life is one of continual, abject, and unrequited toil. In

the second capacity, she is exposed to all the violent revulsions of

feeling that follow, among rude men, the gratification of the animal

passions.

Even in this early stage, however, we may trace some rudiments of those

moral sentiments which are destined at a later period to expand. The

institution of marriage exists. The value of chastity is commonly in some

degree felt, and appears in the indignation which is displayed against the

adulterer. The duty of restraining the passions is largely recognised in

the female, though the males are only restricted by the prohibition of

adultery.

The first two steps which are taken towards the elevation of woman are

probably the abandonment of the custom of purchasing wives, and the

construction of the family on the basis of monogamy. In the earliest

periods of civilisation, the marriage contract was arranged between the

bridegroom and the father of the bride, on the condition of a sum of money

being paid by the former to the latter. This sum, which is known in the

laws of the barbarians as the “mundium,”(552) was in fact a payment to the

father for the cession of his daughter, who thus became the bought slave

of her husband. It is one of the most remarkable features of the ancient

laws of India, that they forbade this gift, on the ground that the parent

should not sell his child;(553) but there can be little doubt that this

sale was at one time the ordinary type of marriage. In the Jewish writings

we find Jacob purchasing Leah and Rachel by certain services to their

father; and this custom, which seems to have been at one time general in

Judea,(554) appears in the age of Homer to have been general in Greece. At

an early period, however, of Greek history, the purchase-money was

replaced by the dowry, or sum of money paid by the father of the bride for

the use of his daughter;(555) and this, although it passed into the hands

of the husband, contributed to elevate the wife, in the first place, by

the dignity it gave her, and, in the next place, by special laws, which

both in Greece and Rome secured it to her in most cases of

separation.(556) The wife thus possessed a guarantee against ill-usage by

her husband. She ceased to be his slave, and became in some degree a

contracting party. Among the early Germans, a different and very

remarkable custom existed. The bride did not bring any dowry to her

husband, nor did the bridegroom give anything to the father of the bride;

but he gave his gift to the bride herself, on the morning after the first

night of marriage, and this, which was called the “Morgengab,” or morning

gift, was the origin of the jointure.(557)

Still more important than the foregoing was the institution of monogamy,

by which, from its earliest days, the Greek civilisation proclaimed its

superiority to the Asiatic civilisations that had preceded it. We may

regard monogamy either in the light of our intuitive moral sentiment on

the subject of purity, or in the light of the interests of society. In its

Oriental or polygamous stage, marriage is regarded almost exclusively, in

its lowest aspect, as a gratification of the passions; while in European

marriages the mutual attachment and respect of the contracting parties,

the formation of a household, and the long train of domestic feelings and

duties that accompany it, have all their distinguished place among the

motives of the contract, and the lower element has comparatively little

prominence. In this way it may be intelligibly said, without any reference

to utilitarian considerations, that monogamy is a higher state than

polygamy. The utilitarian arguments in its defence are also extremely

powerful, and may be summed up in three sentences. Nature, by making the

number of males and females nearly equal, indicates it as natural. In no

other form of marriage can the government of the family, which is one of

the chief ends of marriage, be so happily sustained, and in no other does

woman assume the position of the equal of man.

Monogamy was the general system in Greece, though there are said to have

been slight and temporary deviations into the earlier system, after some

great disasters, when an increase of population was ardently desired.(558)

A broad line must, however, be drawn between the legendary or poetical

period, as reflected in Homer and perpetuated in the tragedians, and the

later historical period. It is one of the most remarkable, and to some

writers one of the most perplexing, facts in the moral history of Greece,

that in the former and ruder period women had undoubtedly the highest

place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection. Moral ideas, in a

thousand forms, have been sublimated, enlarged, and changed, by advancing

civilisation; but it may be fearlessly asserted that the types of female

excellence which are contained in the Greek poems, while they are among

the earliest, are also among the most perfect in the literature of

mankind. The conjugal tenderness of Hector and Andromache; the unwearied

fidelity of Penelope, awaiting through the long revolving years the return

of her storm-tossed husband, who looked forward to her as to the crown of

all his labours; the heroic love of Alcestis, voluntarily dying that her

husband might live; the filial piety of Antigone; the majestic grandeur of

the death of Polyxena; the more subdued and saintly resignation of

Iphigenia, excusing with her last breath the father who had condemned her;

the joyous, modest, and loving Nausicaa, whose figure shines like a

perfect idyll among the tragedies of the Odyssey—all these are pictures of

perennial beauty, which Rome and Christendom, chivalry and modern

civilisation, have neither eclipsed nor transcended. Virgin modesty and

conjugal fidelity, the graces as well as the virtues of the most perfect

womanhood, have never been more exquisitely pourtrayed. The female figures

stand out in the canvas almost as prominently as the male ones, and are

surrounded by an almost equal reverence. The whole history of the Siege of

Troy is a history of the catastrophes that followed a violation of the

nuptial tie. Yet, at the same time, the position of women was in some

respects a degraded one. The custom of purchase-money given to the father

of the bride was general. The husbands appear to have indulged largely,

and with little or no censure, in concubines.(559) Female captives of the

highest rank were treated with great harshness. The inferiority of women

to men was strongly asserted, and it was illustrated and defended by a

very curious physiological notion, that the generative power belonged

exclusively to men, women having only a very subordinate part in the

production of their children.(560) The woman Pandora was said to have been

the author of all human ills.

In the historical age of Greece, the legal position of women had in some

respects slightly improved, but their moral condition had undergone a

marked deterioration. Virtuous women lived a life of perfect seclusion.

The foremost and most dazzling type of Ionic womanhood was the courtesan,

while, among the men, the latitude accorded by public opinion was almost

unrestricted.

The facts in moral history, which it is at once most important and most

difficult to appreciate, are what may be called the facts of feeling. It

is much easier to show what men did or taught than to realise the state of

mind that rendered possible such actions or teaching; and in the case

before us we have to deal with a condition of feeling so extremely remote

from that of our own day, that the difficulty is preeminently great. Very

sensual, and at the same time very brilliant societies, have indeed

repeatedly existed, and the histories of both France and Italy afford many

examples of an artistic and intellectual enthusiasm encircling those who

were morally most frail; but the peculiarity of Greek sensuality is, that

it grew up, for the most part, uncensured, and indeed even encouraged,

under the eyes of some of the most illustrious of moralists. If we can

imagine Ninon de l’Enclos at a time when the rank and splendour of

Parisian society thronged her drawing-rooms, reckoning a Bossuet or a

Fénelon among her followers—if we can imagine these prelates publicly

advising her about the duties of her profession, and the means of

attaching the affections of her lovers—we shall have conceived a relation

scarcely more strange than that which existed between Socrates and the

courtesan Theodota.

In order to reconstruct, as far as possible, the modes of feeling of the

Greek moralists, it will be necessary in the first place to say a few

words concerning one of the most delicate, but at the same time most

important, problems with which the legislator and the moralist have to

deal.

It was a favourite doctrine of the Christian Fathers, that concupiscence,

or the sensual passion, was “the original sin” of human nature; and it

must be owned that the progress of knowledge, which is usually extremely

opposed to the ascetic theory of life, concurs with the theological view,

in showing the natural force of this appetite to be far greater than the

well-being of man requires. The writings of Malthus have proved, what the

Greek moralists appear in a considerable degree to have seen, that its

normal and temperate exercise in the form of marriage, would produce, if

universal, the utmost calamities to the world, and that, while nature

seems in the most unequivocal manner to urge the human race to early

marriages, the first condition of an advancing civilisation in populous

countries is to restrain or diminish them. In no highly civilised society

is marriage general on the first development of the passions, and the

continual tendency of increasing knowledge is to render such marriages

more rare. It is also an undoubted truth that, however much moralists may

enforce the obligation of extra-matrimonial purity, this obligation has

never been even approximately regarded; and in all nations, ages, and

religions a vast mass of irregular indulgence has appeared, which has

probably contributed more than any other single cause to the misery and

the degradation of man.

There are two ends which a moralist, in dealing with this question, will

especially regard—the natural duty of every man doing something for the

support of the child he has called into existence, and the preservation of

the domestic circle unassailed and unpolluted. The family is the centre

and the archetype of the State, and the happiness and goodness of society

are always in a very great degree dependent upon the purity of domestic

life. The essentially exclusive nature of marital affection, and the

natural desire of every man to be certain of the paternity of the child he

supports, render the incursions of irregular passions within the domestic

circle a cause of extreme suffering. Yet it would appear as if the

excessive force of these passions would render such incursions both

frequent and inevitable.

Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is

certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon

which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very

name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the

transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of

lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed,

for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death,

appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and the

sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the

most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of

countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride

of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would

have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and

ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the

world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilisations rise and

fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the

people.

In dealing with this unhappy being, and with all of her sex who have

violated the law of chastity, the public opinion of most Christian

countries pronounces a sentence of extreme severity. In the Anglo-Saxon

nations especially, a single fault of this kind is sufficient, at least in

the upper and middle classes, to affix an indelible brand which no time,

no virtues, no penitence can wholly efface. This sentence is probably, in

the first instance, simply the expression of the religious feeling on the

subject, but it is also sometimes defended by powerful arguments drawn

from the interests of society. It is said that the preservation of

domestic purity is a matter of such transcendent importance that it is

right that the most crushing penalties should be attached to an act which

the imagination can easily transfigure, which legal enactments can never

efficiently control, and to which the most violent passions may prompt. It

is said, too, that an anathema which drives into obscurity all evidences

of sensual passions is peculiarly fitted to restrict their operation; for,

more than any other passions, they are dependent on the imagination, which

is readily fired by the sight of evil. It is added, that the emphasis with

which the vice is stigmatised produces a corresponding admiration for the

opposite virtue, and that a feeling of the most delicate and scrupulous

honour is thus formed among the female population, which not only

preserves from gross sin, but also dignifies and ennobles the whole

character.

In opposition to these views, several considerations of much weight have

been urged. It is argued that, however persistently society may ignore

this form of vice, it exists nevertheless, and on the most gigantic scale,

and that evil rarely assumes such inveterate and perverting forms as when

it is shrouded in obscurity and veiled by an hypocritical appearance of

unconsciousness. The existence in England of certainly not less than fifty

thousand unhappy women,(561) sunk in the very lowest depths of vice and

misery, shows sufficiently what an appalling amount of moral evil is

festering uncontrolled, undiscussed, and unalleviated, under the fair

surface of a decorous society. In the eyes of every physician, and indeed

in the eyes of most continental writers who have adverted to the subject,

no other feature of English life appears so infamous as the fact that an

epidemic, which is one of the most dreadful now existing among mankind,

which communicates itself from the guilty husband to the innocent wife,

and even transmits its taint to her offspring, and which the experience of

other nations conclusively proves may be vastly diminished, should be

suffered to rage unchecked because the Legislature refuses to take

official cognisance of its existence, or proper sanitary measures for its

repression.(562) If the terrible censure which English public opinion

passes upon every instance of female frailty in some degree diminishes the

number, it does not prevent such instances from being extremely numerous,

and it immeasurably aggravates the suffering they produce. Acts which in

other European countries would excite only a slight and transient emotion,

spread in England, over a wide circle, all the bitterness of unmitigated

anguish. Acts which naturally neither imply nor produce a total subversion

of the moral feelings, and which, in other countries, are often followed

by happy, virtuous, and affectionate lives, in England almost invariably

lead to absolute ruin. Infanticide is greatly multiplied, and a vast

proportion of those whose reputations and lives have been blasted by one

momentary sin, are hurled into the abyss of habitual prostitution—a

condition which, owing to the sentence of public opinion and the neglect

of legislators, is in no other European country so hopelessly vicious or

so irrevocable.(563)

It is added, too, that the immense multitude who are thus doomed to the

extremity of life-long wretchedness are not always, perhaps not generally,

of those whose dispositions seem naturally incapable of virtue. The

victims of seduction are often led aside quite as much by the ardour of

their affections, and by the vivacity of their intelligence, as by any

vicious propensities.(564) Even in the lowest grades, the most

dispassionate observers have detected remains of higher feelings, which,

in a different moral atmosphere, and under different moral husbandry,

would have undoubtedly been developed.(565) The statistics of prostitution

show that a great proportion of those who have fallen into it have been

impelled by the most extreme poverty, in many instances verging upon

starvation.(566)

These opposing considerations, which I have very briefly indicated, and

which I do not propose to discuss or to estimate, will be sufficient to

exhibit the magnitude of the problem. In the Greek civilisation,

legislators and moralists endeavoured to meet it by the cordial

recognition of two distinct orders of womanhood(567)—the wife, whose first

duty was fidelity to her husband; the hetæra, or mistress, who subsisted

by her fugitive attachments. The wives of the Greeks lived in almost

absolute seclusion. They were usually married when very young. Their

occupations were to weave, to spin, to embroider, to superintend the

household, to care for their sick slaves. They lived in a special and

retired part of the house. The more wealthy seldom went abroad, and never

except when accompanied by a female slave; never attended the public

spectacles; received no male visitors except in the presence of their

husbands, and had not even a seat at their own tables when male guests

were there. Their pre-eminent virtue was fidelity, and it is probable that

this was very strictly and very generally observed. Their remarkable

freedom from temptations, the public opinion which strongly discouraged

any attempt to seduce them, and the ample sphere for illicit pleasures

that was accorded to the other sex, all contributed to protect it. On the

other hand, living, as they did, almost exclusively among their female

slaves, being deprived of all the educating influence of male society, and

having no place at those public spectacles which were the chief means of

Athenian culture, their minds must necessarily have been exceedingly

contracted. Thucydides doubtless expressed the prevailing sentiment of his

countrymen when he said that the highest merit of woman is not to be

spoken of either for good or for evil; and Phidias illustrated the same

feeling when he represented the heavenly Aphrodite standing on a tortoise,

typifying thereby the secluded life of a virtuous woman.(568)

In their own restricted sphere their lives were probably not unhappy.

Education and custom rendered the purely domestic life that was assigned

to them a second nature, and it must in most instances have reconciled

them to the extra-matrimonial connections in which their husbands too

frequently indulged. The prevailing manners were very gentle. Domestic

oppression is scarcely ever spoken of; the husband lived chiefly in the

public place; causes of jealousy and of dissension could seldom occur; and

a feeling of warm affection, though not a feeling of equality, must

doubtless have in most cases spontaneously arisen. In the writings of

Xenophon we have a charming picture of a husband who had received into his

arms his young wife of fifteen, absolutely ignorant of the world and of

its ways. He speaks to her with extreme kindness, but in the language that

would be used to a little child. Her task, he tells her, is to be like a

queen bee, dwelling continually at home and superintending the work of her

slaves. She must distribute to each their tasks, must economise the family

income, and must take especial care that the house is strictly orderly—the

shoes, the pots, and the clothes always in their places. It is also, he

tells her, a part of her duty to tend her sick slaves; but here his wife

interrupted him, exclaiming, “Nay, but that will indeed be the most

agreeable of my offices, if such as I treat with kindness are likely to be

grateful, and to love me more than before.” With a very tender and

delicate care to avoid everything resembling a reproach, the husband

persuades his wife to give up the habits of wearing high-heeled boots, in

order to appear tall, and of colouring her face with vermilion and white

lead. He promises her that if she faithfully performs her duties he will

himself be the first and most devoted of her slaves. He assured Socrates

that when any domestic dispute arose he could extricate himself admirably,

if he was in the right; but that, whenever he was in the wrong, he found

it impossible to convince his wife that it was otherwise.(569)

We have another picture of Greek married life in the writings of Plutarch,

but it represents the condition of the Greek mind at a later period than

that of Xenophon. In Plutarch the wife is represented not as the mere

housekeeper, or as the chief slave of her husband, but as his equal and

his companion. He enforces, in the strongest terms, reciprocity of

obligations, and desires that the minds of women should be cultivated to

the highest point.(570) His precepts of marriage, indeed, fall little if

at all below any that have appeared in modern days. His letter of

consolation to his wife, on the death of their child, breathes a spirit of

the tenderest affection. It is recorded of him that, having had some

dispute with the relations of his wife, she feared that it might impair

their domestic happiness, and she accordingly persuaded her husband to

accompany her on a pilgrimage to Mount Helicon, where they offered up

together a sacrifice to Love, and prayed that their affection for one

another might never be diminished.

In general, however, the position of the virtuous Greek woman was a very

low one. She was under a perpetual tutelage: first of all to her parents,

who disposed of her hand, then to her husband, and in her days of

widowhood to her sons. In cases of inheritance her male relations were

preferred to her. The privilege of divorce, which, in Athens, at least,

she possessed as well as her husband, appears to have been practically

almost nugatory, on account of the shock which public declarations in the

law court gave to the habits which education and public opinion had

formed. She brought with her, however, a dowry, and the recognised

necessity of endowing daughters was one of the causes of those frequent

expositions which were perpetrated with so little blame. The Athenian law

was also peculiarly careful and tender in dealing with the interests of

female orphans.(571) Plato had argued that women were equal to men; but

the habits of the people were totally opposed to this theory. Marriage was

regarded chiefly in a civic light, as the means of producing citizens, and

in Sparta it was ordered that old or infirm husbands should cede their

young wives to stronger men, who could produce vigorous soldiers for the

State. The Lacedæmonian treatment of women, which differed in many

respects from that which prevailed in the other Greek States, while it was

utterly destructive of all delicacy of feeling or action, had undoubtedly

the effect of producing a fierce and masculine patriotism; and many fine

examples are recorded of Spartan mothers devoting their sons on the altar

of their country, rejoicing over their deaths when nobly won, and infusing

their own heroic spirit into the armies of the people. For the most part,

however, the names of virtuous women seldom appear in Greek history. The

simple modesty which was evinced by Phocion’s wife, in the period when her

husband occupied the foremost position in Athens,(572) and a few instances

of conjugal and filial affection, have been recorded; but in general the

only women who attracted the notice of the people were the hetæræ, or

courtesans.(573)

In order to understand the position which these last assumed in Greek

life, we must transport ourselves in thought into a moral latitude totally

different from our own. The Greek conception of excellence was the full

and perfect development of humanity in all its organs and functions, and

without any tinge of asceticism. Some parts of human nature were

recognised as higher than others; and to suffer any of the lower appetites

to obscure the mind, restrain the will and engross the energies of life,

was acknowledged to be disgraceful; but the systematic repression of a

natural appetite was totally foreign to Greek modes of thought.

Legislators, moralists, and the general voice of the people, appear to

have applied these principles almost unreservedly to intercourse between

the sexes, and the most virtuous men habitually and openly entered into

relations which would now be almost universally censured.

The experience, however, of many societies has shown that a public opinion

may accord, in this respect, almost unlimited licence to one sex, without

showing any corresponding indulgence to the other. But, in Greece, a

concurrence of causes had conspired to bring a certain section of

courtesans into a position they have in no other society attained. The

voluptuous worship of Aphrodite gave a kind of religious sanction to their

profession. Courtesans were the priestesses in her temples, and those of

Corinth were believed by their prayers to have averted calamities from

their city. Prostitution is said to have entered into the religious rites

of Babylon, Biblis, Cyprus, and Corinth, and these as well as Miletus,

Tenedos, Lesbos, and Abydos became famous for their schools of vice, which

grew up under the shadow of the temples.(574)

In the next place, the intense æsthetic enthusiasm that prevailed was

eminently fitted to raise the most beautiful to honour. In a land and

beneath a sky where natural beauty developed to the highest point, there

arose a school of matchless artists both in painting and in sculpture, and

public games and contests were celebrated, in which supreme physical

perfection was crowned by an assembled people. In no other period of the

world’s history was the admiration of beauty in all its forms so

passionate or so universal. It coloured the whole moral teaching of the

time, and led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest

kind of supersensual beauty. It appeared in all literature, where the

beauty of form and style was the first of studies. It supplied at once the

inspiration and the rule of all Greek art. It led the Greek wife to pray,

before all other prayers, for the beauty of her children. It surrounded

the most beautiful with an aureole of admiring reverence. The courtesan

was often the queen of beauty. She was the model of the statues of

Aphrodite, that commanded the admiration of Greece. Praxiteles was

accustomed to reproduce the form of Phryne, and her statue, carved in

gold, stood in the temple of Apollo at Delphi; and when she was accused of

corrupting the youth of Athens, her advocate, Hyperides, procured her

acquittal by suddenly unveiling her charms before the dazzled eyes of the

assembled judges. Apelles was at once the painter and the lover of Laïs,

and Alexander gave him, as the choicest gift, his own favourite concubine,

of whom the painter had become enamoured while pourtraying her. The chief

flower-painter of antiquity acquired his skill through his love of the

flower-girl Glycera, whom he was accustomed to paint among her garlands.

Pindar and Simonides sang the praises of courtesans, and grave

philosophers made pilgrimages to visit them, and their names were known in

every city.(575)

It is not surprising that, in such a state of thought and feeling, many of

the more ambitious and accomplished women should have betaken themselves

to this career, nor yet that they should have attained the social position

which the secluded existence and the enforced ignorance of the Greek wives

had left vacant. The courtesan was the one free woman of Athens, and she

often availed herself of her freedom to acquire a degree of knowledge

which enabled her to add to her other charms an intense intellectual

fascination. Gathering around her the most brilliant artists, poets,

historians, and philosophers, she flung herself unreservedly into the

intellectual and æsthetic enthusiasms of her time, and soon became the

centre of a literary society of matchless splendour. Aspasia, who was as

famous for her genius as for her beauty, won the passionate love of

Pericles. She is said to have instructed him in eloquence, and to have

composed some of his most famous orations; she was continually consulted

on affairs of state; and Socrates, like other philosophers, attended her

assemblies. Socrates himself has owned his deep obligations to the

instructions of a courtesan named Diotima. The courtesan Leontium was

among the most ardent disciples of Epicurus.(576)

Another cause probably contributed indirectly to the elevation of this

class, to which it is extremely difficult to allude in an English book,

but which it is impossible altogether to omit, even in the most cursory

survey of Greek morals. Irregular female connections were looked upon as

ordinary and not disgraceful incidents in the life of a good man, for they

were compared with that lower abyss of unnatural love, which was the

deepest and strangest taint of Greek civilisation. This vice, which never

appears in the writings of Homer and Hesiod, doubtless arose under the

influence of the public games, which, accustoming men to the contemplation

of absolutely nude figures,(577) awoke an unnatural passion,(578) totally

remote from all modern feelings, but which in Greece it was regarded as

heroic to resist.(579) The popular religion in this, as in other cases,

was made to bend to the new vice. Hebe, the cup-bearer of the gods, was

replaced by Ganymede, and the worst vices of earth were transported to

Olympus.(580) Artists sought to reflect the passion in their statues of

the Hermaphrodite, of Bacchus, and the more effeminate Apollo; moralists

were known to praise it as the bond of friendship, and it was spoken of as

the inspiring enthusiasm of the heroic Theban legion of Epaminondas.(581)

In general, however, it was stigmatised as unquestionably a vice, but it

was treated with a levity we can now hardly conceive. We can scarcely have

a better illustration of the extent to which moral ideas and feelings have

changed, than the fact that the first two Greeks who were considered

worthy of statues by their fellow-countrymen are said to have been

Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who were united by an impure love, and who

were glorified for a political assassination.(582)

It is probable that this cause conspired with the others to dissociate the

class of courtesans from the idea of supreme depravity with which they

have usually been connected. The great majority, however, were sunk in

this, as in all other ages, in abject degradation;(583) comparatively few

attained the condition of hetæræ, and even of these it is probable that

the greater number exhibited the characteristics which in all ages have

attached to their class. Faithlessness, extreme rapacity, and extravagant

luxury, were common among them; but yet it is unquestionable that there

were many exceptions. The excommunication of society did not press upon or

degrade them; and though they were never regarded with the same honour as

married women, it seems generally to have been believed that the wife and

the courtesan had each her place and her function in the world, and her

own peculiar type of excellence. The courtesan Leæna, who was a friend of

Harmodius, died in torture rather than reveal the conspiracy of her

friend, and the Athenians, in allusion to her name, caused the statue of a

tongueless lioness to be erected to commemorate her constancy.(584) The

gentle manners and disinterested affection of a courtesan named Bacchis

were especially recorded, and a very touching letter paints her character,

and describes the regret that followed her to the tomb.(585) In one of the

most remarkable of his pictures of Greek life, Xenophon describes how

Socrates, having heard of the beauty of the courtesan Theodota, went with

his disciples to ascertain for himself whether the report was true; how

with a quiet humour he questioned her about the sources of the luxury of

her dwelling, and how he proceeded to sketch for her the qualities she

should cultivate in order to attach her lovers. She ought, he tells her,

to shut the door against the insolent, to watch her lovers in sickness, to

rejoice greatly when they succeed in anything honourable, to love tenderly

those who love her. Having carried on a cheerful and perfectly

unembarrassed conversation with her, with no kind of reproach on his part,

either expressed or implied, and with no trace either of the timidity or

effrontery of conscious guilt upon hers, the best and wisest of the Greeks

left his hostess with a graceful compliment to her beauty.(586)

My task in describing this aspect of Greek life has been an eminently

unpleasing one, and I should certainly not have entered upon even the

baldest and most guarded disquisition on a subject so difficult, painful,

and delicate, had it not been absolutely indispensable to a history of

morals to give at least an outline of the progress that has been effected

in this sphere. What I have written will sufficiently explain why Greece,

which was fertile, beyond all other lands, in great men, was so remarkably

barren of great women. It will show, too, that while the Greek moralists

recognised, like ourselves, the distinction between the higher and the

lower sides of our nature, they differed very widely from modern public

opinion in the standard of morals they enforced. The Christian doctrine,

that it is criminal to gratify a powerful and a transient physical

appetite, except under the condition of a lifelong contract, was

altogether unknown. Strict duties were imposed upon Greek wives. Duties

were imposed at a later period, though less strictly, upon the husband.

Unnatural love was stigmatised, but with a levity of censure which to a

modern mind appears inexpressibly revolting. Some slight legal

disqualifications rested upon the whole class of hetæræ, and, though more

admired, they were less respected than women who had adopted a domestic

life; but a combination of circumstances had raised them, in actual worth

and in popular estimation, to an unexampled elevation, and an aversion to

marriage became very general, and extra-matrimonial connections were

formed with the most perfect frankness and publicity.

If we now turn to the Roman civilisation, we shall find that some

important advances had been made in the condition of women. The virtue of

chastity has, as I have shown, been regarded in two different ways. The

utilitarian view, which commonly prevails in countries where a political

spirit is more powerful than a religious spirit, regards marriage as the

ideal state, and to promote the happiness, sanctity, and security of this

state is the main object of all its precepts. The mystical view which

rests upon the natural feeling of shame, and which, as history proves, has

prevailed especially where political sentiment is very low, and religious

sentiment very strong, regards virginity as its supreme type, and marriage

as simply the most pardonable declension from ideal purity. It is, I

think, a very remarkable fact, that at the head of the religious system of

Rome we find two sacerdotal bodies which appear respectively to typify

these ideas. The Flamens of Jupiter and the Vestal Virgins were the two

most sacred orders in Rome. The ministrations of each were believed to be

vitally important to the State. Each could officiate only within the walls

of Rome. Each was appointed with the most imposing ceremonies. Each was

honoured with the most profound reverence. But in one important respect

they differed. The Vestal was the type of virginity, and her purity was

guarded by the most terrific penalties. The Flamen, on the other hand, was

the representative of Roman marriage in its strictest and holiest form. He

was necessarily married. His marriage was celebrated with the most solemn

rites. It could only be dissolved by death. If his wife died, he was

degraded from his office.(587)

Of these two orders, there can be no question that the Flamen was the most

faithful expression of the Roman sentiments. The Roman religion was

essentially domestic, and it was a main object of the legislator to

surround marriage with every circumstance of dignity and solemnity.

Monogamy was, from the earliest times, strictly enjoined; and it was one

of the great benefits that have resulted from the expansion of Roman

power, that it made this type dominant in Europe. In the legends of early

Rome we have ample evidence both of the high moral estimate of women, and

of their prominence in Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia and of

Virginia display a delicacy of honour, a sense of the supreme excellence

of unsullied purity, which no Christian nation could surpass. The legends

of the Sabine women interceding between their parents and their husbands,

and thus saving the infant republic, and of the mother of Coriolanus

averting by her prayers the ruin impending over her country, entitled

women to claim their share in the patriotic glories of Rome. A temple of

Venus Calva was associated with the legend of Roman ladies, who, in an

hour of danger, cut off their long tresses to make bowstrings for the

soldiers.(588) Another temple preserved to all posterity the memory of the

filial piety of that Roman woman who, when her mother was condemned to be

starved to death, obtained permission to visit her in her prison, and was

discovered feeding her from her breast.(589)

The legal position, however, of the Roman wife was for a long period

extremely low. The Roman family was constituted on the principle of the

uncontrolled authority of its head, both over his wife and over his

children, and he could repudiate the former at will. Neither the custom of

gifts to the father of the bride, nor the custom of dowries, appears to

have existed in the earliest period of Roman history; but the father

disposed absolutely of the hand of his daughter, and sometimes even

possessed the power of breaking off marriages that had been actually

contracted.(590) In the forms of marriage, however, which were usual in

the earlier periods of Rome, the absolute power passed into the hands of

the husband, and he had the right, in some cases, of putting her to

death.(591) Law and public opinion combined in making matrimonial purity

most strict. For five hundred and twenty years, it was said, there was no

such thing as a divorce in Rome.(592) Manners were so severe, that a

senator was censured for indecency because he had kissed his wife in the

presence of their daughter.(593) It was considered in a high degree

disgraceful for a Roman mother to delegate to a nurse the duty of suckling

her child.(594) Sumptuary laws regulated with the most minute severity all

the details of domestic economy.(595) The courtesan class, though probably

numerous and certainly uncontrolled, were regarded with much contempt. The

disgrace of publicly professing themselves members of it was believed to

be a sufficient punishment;(596) and an old law, which was probably

intended to teach in symbol the duties of married life, enjoined that no

such person should touch the altar of Juno.(597) It was related of a

certain ædile, that he failed to obtain redress for an assault which had

been made upon him, because it had occurred in a house of ill-fame, in

which it was disgraceful for a Roman magistrate to be found.(598) The

sanctity of female purity was believed to be attested by all nature. The

most savage animals became tame before a virgin.(599) When a woman walked

naked round a field, caterpillars and all loathsome insects fell dead

before her.(600) It was said that drowned men floated on their backs, and

drowned women on their faces; and this, in the opinion of Roman

naturalists, was due to the superior purity of the latter.(601)

It was a remark of Aristotle, that the superiority of the Greeks to the

barbarians was shown, among other things, in the fact that the Greeks did

not, like other nations, regard their wives as slaves, but treated them as

helpmates and companions. A Roman writer has appealed, on the whole with

greater justice, to the treatment of wives by his fellow countrymen, as a

proof of the superiority of Roman to Greek civilisation. He has observed

that while the Greeks kept their wives in a special quarter in the

interior of their houses, and never permitted them to sit at banquets

except with their relatives, or to see any male except in the presence of

a relative, no Roman ever hesitated to lead his wife with him to the

feast, or to place the mother of the family at the head of his table.(602)

Whether, in the period when wives were completely subject to the rule of

their husbands, much domestic oppression occurred, it is now impossible to

say. A temple dedicated to a goddess named Viriplaca, whose mission was to

appease husbands, was worshipped by Roman women on the Palatine;(603) and

a strange and improbable, if not incredible story, is related by Livy, of

the discovery during the Republic, of a vast conspiracy by Roman wives to

poison their husbands.(604) On the whole, however, it is probable that the

Roman matron was from the earliest period a name of honour;(605) that the

beautiful sentence of a jurisconsult of the Empire, who defined marriage

as a lifelong fellowship of all divine and human rights,(606) expressed

most faithfully the feelings of the people, and that female virtue had in

every age a considerable place in Roman biographies.(607)

I have already enumerated the chief causes of that complete dissolution of

Roman morals which began shortly after the Punic wars, which contributed

very largely to the destruction of the Republic, and which attained its

climax under the Cæsars. There are few examples in history of a revolution

pervading so completely every sphere of religious, domestic, social, and

political life. Philosophical scepticism corroded the ancient religions.

An inundation of Eastern luxury and Eastern morals submerged all the old

habits of austere simplicity. The civil wars and the Empire degraded the

character of the people, and the exaggerated prudery of republican manners

only served to make the rebound into vice the more irresistible. In the

fierce outburst of ungovernable and almost frantic depravity that marked

this evil period, the violations of female virtue were infamously

prominent. The vast multiplication of slaves, which is in every age

peculiarly fatal to moral purity; the fact that a great proportion of

those slaves were chosen from the most voluptuous provinces of the Empire;

the games of Flora, in which races of naked courtesans were exhibited; the

pantomimes, which derived their charms chiefly from the audacious

indecencies of the actors; the influx of the Greek and Asiatic hetæræ who

were attracted by the wealth of the metropolis; the licentious paintings

which began to adorn every house; the rise of Baiæ, which rivalled the

luxury and surpassed the beauty of the chief centres of Asiatic vice,

combining with the intoxication of great wealth suddenly acquired, with

the disruption, through many causes, of all the ancient habits and

beliefs, and with the tendency to pleasure which the closing of the paths

of honourable political ambition by the imperial despotism, naturally

produced, had all their part in preparing those orgies of vice which the

writers of the Empire reveal. Most scholars will, I suppose, retain a

vivid recollection of the new insight into the extent and wildness of

human guilt which they obtained when they first opened the pages of

Suetonius or Lampridius; and the sixth Satire of Juvenal paints with a

fierce energy, though probably with the natural exaggeration of a

satirist, the extent to which corruption had spread among the women. It

was found necessary, under Tiberius, to make a special law prohibiting

members of noble houses from enrolling themselves as prostitutes.(608) The

extreme coarseness of the Roman disposition prevented sensuality from

assuming that æsthetic character which had made it in Greece the parent of

Art, and had very profoundly modified its influence, while the passion for

gladiatorial shows often allied it somewhat unnaturally with cruelty.

There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more

rare than under the Cæsars; but there has probably never been a period

when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled. Young emperors especially,

who were surrounded by swarms of sycophants and panders, and who often

lived in continual dread of assassination, plunged with the most reckless

and feverish excitement into every variety of abnormal lust. The reticence

which has always more or less characterised modern society and modern

writers was unknown, and the unblushing, undisguised obscenity of the

Epigrams of Martial, of the Romances of Apuleius and Petronius, and of

some of the Dialogues of Lucian, reflected but too faithfully the spirit

of their time.

There had arisen, too, partly through vicious causes, and partly, I

suppose, through the unfavourable influence which the attraction of the

public institutions exercised on domestic life, a great and general

indisposition towards marriage, which Augustus attempted in vain to arrest

by his laws against celibacy, and by conferring many privileges on the

fathers of three children.(609) A singularly curious speech is preserved,

which is said to have been delivered on this subject, shortly before the

close of the Republic, by Metellus Numidicus, in order, if possible, to

overcome this indisposition. “If, Romans,” he said, “we could live without

wives, we should all keep free from that source of trouble; but since

nature has ordained that men can neither live sufficiently agreeably with

wives, nor at all without them, let us consider the perpetual endurance of

our race rather than our own brief enjoyment.”(610)

In the midst of this torrent of corruption a great change was passing over

the legal position of Roman women. They had at first been in a condition

of absolute subjection or subordination to their relations. They arrived,

during the Empire, at a point of freedom and dignity which they

subsequently lost, and have never altogether regained. The Romans

recognised two distinct classes of marriages: the stricter, and, in the

eyes of the law, more honourable, forms, which placed the woman “in the

hand” of her husband and gave him an almost absolute authority over her

person and her property; and a less strict form, which left her legal

position unchanged. The former, which were general during the Republic,

were of three kinds—the “confarreatio,” which was celebrated and could

only be dissolved by the most solemn religious ceremonies, and was

jealously restricted to patricians; the “coemptio,” which was purely

civil, and derived its name from a symbolical sale; and the “usus,” which

was effected by the mere cohabitation of a woman with a man without

interruption for the space of a year. Under the Empire, however, these

kinds of marriage became almost wholly obsolete; a laxer form, resting

upon a simple mutual agreement, without any religious or civil ceremony,

was general, and it had this very important consequence, that the woman so

married remained, in the eyes of the law, in the family of her father, and

was under his guardianship, not under the guardianship of her husband. But

the old _patria potestas_ had become completely obsolete, and the

practical effect of the general adoption of this form of marriage was the

absolute legal independence of the wife. With the exception of her dowry,

which passed into the hands of her husband, she held her property in her

own right; she inherited her share of the wealth of her father, and she

retained it altogether independently of her husband. A very considerable

portion of Roman wealth thus passed into the uncontrolled possession of

women. The private man of business of the wife was a favourite character

with the comedians, and the tyranny exercised by rich wives over their

husbands—to whom it is said they sometimes lent money at high interest—a

continual theme of satirists.(611)

A complete revolution had thus passed over the constitution of the family.

Instead of being constructed on the principle of autocracy, it was

constructed on the principle of coequal partnership. The legal position of

the wife had become one of complete independence, while her social

position was one of great dignity. The more conservative spirits were

naturally alarmed at the change, and two measures were taken to arrest it.

The Oppian law was designed to restrain the luxury of women; but, in spite

of the strenuous exertions of Cato, this law was speedily repealed.(612) A

more important measure was the Voconian law, which restricted within very

narrow limits the property which women might inherit; but public opinion

never fully acquiesced in it, and by several legal subterfuges its

operation was partially evaded.(613)

Another and a still more important consequence resulted from the changed

form of marriage. Being looked upon merely as a civil contract, entered

into for the happiness of the contracting parties, its continuance

depended upon mutual consent. Either party might dissolve it at will, and

the dissolution gave both parties a right to remarry. There can be no

question that under this system the obligations of marriage were treated

with extreme levity. We find Cicero repudiating his wife Terentia, because

he desired a new dowry;(614) Augustus compelling the husband of Livia to

repudiate her when she was already pregnant, that he might marry her

himself;(615) Cato ceding his wife, with the consent of her father, to his

friend Hortensius, and resuming her after his death;(616) Mæcenas

continually changing his wife;(617) Sempronius Sophus repudiating his

wife, because she had once been to the public games without his

knowledge;(618) Paulus Æmilius taking the same step without assigning any

reason, and defending himself by saying, “My shoes are new and well made,

but no one knows where they pinch me.”(619) Nor did women show less

alacrity in repudiating their husbands. Seneca denounced this evil with

especial vehemence, declaring that divorce in Rome no longer brought with

it any shame, and that there were women who reckoned their years rather by

their husbands than by the consuls.(620) Christians and Pagans echoed the

same complaint. According to Tertullian, “divorce is the fruit of

marriage.”(621) Martial speaks of a woman who had already arrived at her

tenth husband;(622) Juvenal, of a woman having eight husbands in five

years.(623) But the most extraordinary recorded instance of this kind is

related by St. Jerome, who assures us that there existed at Rome a wife

who was married to her twenty-third husband, she herself being his

twenty-first wife.(624)

These are, no doubt, extreme cases; but it is unquestionable that the

stability of married life was very seriously impaired. It would be easy,

however, to exaggerate the influence of legal changes in affecting it. In

a purer state of public opinion a very wide latitude of divorce might

probably have been allowed to both parties, without any serious

consequence. The right of repudiation, which the husband had always

possessed, was, as we have seen, in the Republic never or very rarely

exercised. Of those who scandalised good men by the rapid recurrence of

their marriages, probably most, if marriage had been indissoluble, would

have refrained from entering into it, and would have contented themselves

with many informal connections, or, if they had married, would have

gratified their love of change by simple adultery. A vast wave of

corruption had flowed in upon Rome, and under any system of law it would

have penetrated into domestic life. Laws prohibiting all divorce have

never secured the purity of married life in ages of great corruption, nor

did the latitude which was accorded in imperial Rome prevent the existence

of a very large amount of female virtue.

I have observed, in a former chapter, that the moral contrasts shown in

ancient life surpass those of modern societies, in which we very rarely

find clusters of heroic or illustrious men arising in nations that are in

general very ignorant or very corrupt. I have endeavoured to account for

this fact by showing that the moral agencies of antiquity were in general

much more fitted to develop virtue than to repress vice, and that they

raised noble natures to almost the highest conceivable point of

excellence, while they entirely failed to coerce or to attenuate the

corruption of the depraved. In the female life of Imperial Rome we find

these contrasts vividly displayed. There can be no question that the moral

tone of the sex was extremely low—lower, probably, than in France under

the Regency, or in England under the Restoration—and it is also certain

that frightful excesses of unnatural passion, of which the most corrupt of

modern courts present no parallel, were perpetrated with but little

concealment on the Palatine. Yet there is probably no period in which

examples of conjugal heroism and fidelity appear more frequently than in

this very age, in which marriage was most free and in which corruption was

so general. Much simplicity of manners continued to co-exist with the

excesses of an almost unbridled luxury. Augustus, we are told, used to

make his daughters and granddaughters weave and spin, and his wife and

sister made most of the clothes he wore.(625) The skill of wives in

domestic economy, and especially in spinning, was frequently noticed in

their epitaphs.(626) Intellectual culture was much diffused among

them,(627) and we meet with several noble specimens, in the sex, of large

and accomplished minds united with all the gracefulness of intense

womanhood, and all the fidelity of the truest love. Such were Cornelia,

the brilliant and devoted wife of Pompey,(628) Marcia, the friend, and

Helvia, the mother of Seneca. The Northern Italian cities had in a great

degree escaped the contamination of the times, and Padua and Brescia were

especially noted for the virtue of their women.(629) In an age of

extravagant sensuality a noble lady, named Mallonia, plunged her dagger in

her heart rather than yield to the embraces of Tiberius.(630) To the

period when the legal bond of marriage was most relaxed must be assigned

most of those noble examples of the constancy of Roman wives, which have

been for so many generations household tales among mankind. Who has not

read with emotion of the tenderness and heroism of Porcia, claiming her

right to share in the trouble which clouded her husband’s brow; how,

doubting her own courage, she did not venture to ask Brutus to reveal to

her his enterprise till she had secretly tried her power of endurance by

piercing her thigh with a knife; how once, and but once in his presence,

her noble spirit failed, when, as she was about to separate from him for

the last time, her eye chanced to fall upon a picture of the parting

interview of Hector and Andromache?(631) Paulina, the wife of Seneca,

opened her own veins in order to accompany her husband to the grave; when

much blood had already flowed, her slaves and freedmen bound her wounds,

and thus compelled her to live; but the Romans ever after observed with

reverence the sacred pallor of her countenance—the memorial of her

act.(632) When Pætus was condemned to die by his own hand, those who knew

the love which his wife Arria bore him, and the heroic fervour of her

character, predicted that she would not long survive him. Thrasea, who had

married her daughter, endeavoured to dissuade her from suicide by saying,

“If I am ever called upon to perish, would you wish your daughter to die

with me?” She answered, “Yes, if she will have then lived with you as long

and as happily as I with Pætus.” Her friends attempted, by carefully

watching her, to secure her safety, but she dashed her head against the

wall with such force that she fell upon the ground, and then, rising up,

she said, “I told you I would find a hard way to death if you refuse me an

easy way.” All attempts to restrain her were then abandoned, and her death

was perhaps the most majestic in antiquity. Pætus for a moment hesitated

to strike the fatal blow; but his wife, taking the dagger, plunged it

deeply into her own breast, and then, drawing it out, gave it, all reeking

as it was, to her husband, exclaiming, with her dying breath, “My Pætus,

it does not pain.”(633)

The form of the elder Arria towers grandly above her fellows, but many

other Roman wives in the days of the early Cæsars and of Domitian

exhibited a very similar fidelity. Over the dark waters of the Euxine,

into those unknown and inhospitable regions from which the Roman

imagination recoiled with a peculiar horror, many noble ladies freely

followed their husbands, and there were some wives who refused to survive

them.(634) The younger Arria was the faithful companion of Thrasea during

his heroic life, and when he died she was only persuaded to live that she

might bring up their daughters.(635) She spent the closing days of her

life with Domitian in exile;(636) while her daughter, who was as

remarkable for the gentleness as for the dignity of her character,(637)

went twice into exile with her husband Helvidius, and was once banished,

after his death, for defending his memory.(638) Incidental notices in

historians, and a few inscriptions which have happened to remain, show us

that such instances were not uncommon, and in Roman epitaphs no feature is

more remarkable than the deep and passionate expressions of conjugal love

that continually occur.(639) It would be difficult to find a more touching

image of that love, than the medallion which is so common on the Roman

sarcophagi, in which husband and wife are represented together, each with

an arm thrown fondly over the shoulder of the other, united in death as

they had been in life, and meeting it with an aspect of perfect calm,

because they were companions in the tomb.

In the latter days of the Pagan Empire some measures were taken to repress

the profligacy that was so prevalent. Domitian enforced the old Scantinian

law against unnatural love.(640) Vespasian moderated the luxury of the

court; Macrinus caused those who had committed adultery to be bound

together and burnt alive.(641) A practice of men and women bathing

together was condemned by Hadrian, and afterwards by Alexander Severus,

but was only finally suppressed by Constantine. Alexander Severus and

Philip waged an energetic war against panders.(642) The extreme excesses

of this, as of most forms of vice, were probably much diminished after the

accession of the Antonines; but Rome continued to be a centre of very

great corruption till the influence of Christianity, the removal of the

court to Constantinople, and the impoverishment that followed the

barbarian conquests, in a measure corrected the evil.

Among the moralists, however, some important steps were taken. One of the

most important was a very clear assertion of the reciprocity of that

obligation to fidelity in marriage which in the early stages of society

had been imposed almost exclusively upon wives.(643) The legends of

Clytemnestra and of Medea reveal the feelings of fierce resentment which

were sometimes produced among Greek wives by the almost unlimited

indulgence that was accorded to their husbands;(644) and it is told of

Andromache, as the supreme instance of her love of Hector, that she cared

for his illegitimate children as much as for her own.(645) In early Rome,

the obligations of husbands were never, I imagine, altogether unfelt; but

they were rarely or never enforced, nor were they ever regarded as bearing

any kind of equality to those imposed upon the wife. The term adultery,

and all the legal penalties connected with it, were restricted to the

infractions by a wife of the nuptial tie. Among the many instances of

magnanimity recorded of Roman wives, few are more touching than that of

Tertia Æmilia, the faithful wife of Scipio. She discovered that her

husband had become enamoured of one of her slaves; but she bore her pain

in silence, and when he died she gave liberty to her captive, for she

could not bear that she should remain in servitude whom her dear lord had

loved.(646)

Aristotle had clearly asserted the duty of husbands to observe in marriage

the same fidelity as they expected from their wives,(647) and at a later

period both Plutarch and Seneca enforced this duty in the strongest and

most unequivocal manner.(648) The degree to which, in theory at least, it

won its way in Roman life is shown by its recognition as a legal maxim by

Ulpian,(649) and by its appearance in a formal judgment of Antoninus Pius,

who, while issuing, at the request of a husband, a condemnation for

adultery against a guilty wife, appended to it this remarkable condition:

“Provided always it is established that by your life you gave her an

example of fidelity. It would be unjust that a husband should exact a

fidelity he does not himself keep.”(650)

Another change, which may be dimly descried in the later Pagan society,

was a tendency to regard purity rather in a mystical point of view, as

essentially good, than in the utilitarian point of view. This change

resulted chiefly from the rise of the Neoplatonic and Pythagorean

philosophies, which concurred in regarding the body, with its passions, as

essentially evil, and in representing all virtue as a purification from

its taint. Its most important consequence was a somewhat stricter view of

pre-nuptial unchastity, which in the case of men, and when it was not

excessive, and did not take the form of adultery, had previously been

uncensured, or was looked upon with a disapprobation so slight as scarcely

to amount to censure. The elder Cato had expressly justified it;(651) and

Cicero has left us an extremely curious judgment on the subject, which

shows at a glance the feelings of the people, and the vast revolution

that, under the influence of Christianity, has been effected in, at least,

the professions of mankind. “If there be any one,” he says, “who thinks

that young men should be altogether restrained from the love of

courtesans, he is indeed very severe. I am not prepared to deny his

position; but he differs not only from the licence of our age, but also

from the customs and allowances of our ancestors. When, indeed, was this

not done? When was it blamed? When was it not allowed? When was that which

is now lawful not lawful?”(652) Epictetus, who on most subjects was among

the most austere of the Stoics, recommends his disciples to abstain, “as

far as possible,” from pre-nuptial connections, and at least from those

which were adulterous and unlawful, but not to blame those who were less

strict.(653) The feeling of the Romans is curiously exemplified in the

life of Alexander Severus, who, of all the emperors, was probably the most

energetic in legislating against vice. When appointing a provincial

governor, he was accustomed to provide him with horses and servants, and,

if he was unmarried, with a concubine, “because,” as the historian very

gravely observes, “it was impossible that he could exist without

one.”(654)

What was written among the Pagans in opposition to these views was not

much, but it is worthy of notice, as illustrating the tendency that had

arisen. Musonius Rufus distinctly and emphatically asserted that no union

of the sexes other than marriage was permissible.(655) Dion Chrysostom

desired prostitution to be suppressed by law. The ascetic notion of the

impurity even of marriage may be faintly traced. Apollonius of Tyana

lived, on this ground, a life of celibacy.(656) Zenobia refused to cohabit

with her husband, except so far as was necessary for the production of an

heir.(657) Hypatia is said, like many Christian saints, to have maintained

the position of a virgin wife.(658) The belief in the impurity of all

corporeal things, and in the duty of rising above them, was in the third

century strenuously enforced.(659) Marcus Aurelius and Julian were both

admirable representatives of the best Pagan spirit of their time. Each of

them lost his wife early, each was eulogised by his biographer for the

virtue he manifested after her death; but there is a curious and

characteristic difference in the forms which that virtue assumed. Marcus

Aurelius, we are told, did not wish to bring into his house a stepmother

to rule over his children, and accordingly took a concubine.(660) Julian

ever after lived in perfect continence.(661)

The foregoing facts, which I have given in the most condensed form, and

almost unaccompanied by criticism or by comment, will be sufficient, I

hope, to exhibit the state of feeling of the Romans on this subject, and

also the direction in which that feeling was being modified. Those who are

familiar with this order of studies will readily understand that it is

impossible to mark out with precision the chronology of a moral sentiment;

but there can be no question that in the latter days of the Roman Empire

the perceptions of men on this subject became more subtle and more refined

than they had previously been, and it is equally certain that the Oriental

philosophies which had superseded Stoicism largely influenced the change.

Christianity soon constituted itself the representative of the new

tendency. It regarded purity as the most important of all virtues, and it

strained to the utmost all the vast agencies it possessed, to enforce it.

In the legislation of the first Christian emperors we find many traces of

a fiery zeal. Panders were condemned to have molten lead poured down their

throats. In the case of rape, not only the ravisher, but even the injured

person, if she consented to the act, was put to death.(662) A great

service was done to the cause both of purity and of philanthropy, by a law

which permitted actresses, on receiving baptism, to abandon their

profession, which had been made a form of slavery, and was virtually a

slavery to vice.(663) Certain musical girls, who were accustomed to sing

or play at the banquets of the rich, and who were regarded with extreme

horror by the Fathers, were suppressed, and a very stringent law forbade

the revival of the class.(664)

Side by side with the civil legislation, the penitential legislation of

the Church was exerted in the same direction. Sins of unchastity probably

occupy a larger place than any others in its enactments. The cases of

unnatural love, and of mothers who had made their daughters courtesans,

were punished by perpetual exclusion from communion, and a crowd of minor

offences were severely visited. The ascetic passion increased the

prominence of this branch of ethics, and the imaginations of men were soon

fascinated by the pure and noble figures of the virgin martyrs of the

Church, who on more than one occasion fully equalled the courage of men,

while they sometimes mingled with their heroism traits of the most

exquisite feminine gentleness. For the patient endurance of excruciating

physical suffering, Christianity produced no more sublime figure than

Blandina, the poor servant-girl who was martyred at Lyons; and it would be

difficult to find in all history a more touching picture of natural purity

than is contained in one simple incident of the martyrdom of St. Perpetua.

It is related of that saint that she was condemned to be slaughtered by a

wild bull, and, as she fell half dead from its horns upon the sand of the

arena, it was observed that even in that awful moment her virgin modesty

was supreme, and her first instinctive movement was to draw together her

dress, which had been torn in the assault.(665)

A crowd of very curious popular legends also arose, which, though they are

for the most part without much intrinsic excellence, have their importance

in history, as showing the force with which the imaginations of men were

turned in this direction, and the manner in which Christianity was

regarded as the great enemy of the passions of the flesh. Thus, St. Jerome

relates an incredible story of a young Christian, being, in the Diocletian

persecution, bound with ribands of silk in the midst of a lovely garden,

surrounded by everything that could charm the ear and the eye, while a

beautiful courtesan assailed him with her blandishments, against which he

protected himself by biting out his tongue and spitting it in her

face.(666) Legends are recounted of young Christian men assuming the garb

and manners of libertines, that they might obtain access to maidens who

had been condemned to vice, exchanging dresses with them, and thus

enabling them to escape.(667) St. Agnes was said to have been stripped

naked before the people, who all turned away their eyes except one young

man, who instantly became blind.(668) The sister of St. Gregory of Nyssa

was afflicted with a cancer in her breast, but could not bear that a

surgeon should see it, and was rewarded for her modesty by a miraculous

cure.(669) To the fabled zone of beauty the Christian saints opposed their

zones of chastity, which extinguished the passion of the wearer, or would

only meet around the pure.(670) Dæmons were said not unfrequently to have

entered into the profligate. The garment of a girl who was possessed was

brought to St. Pachomius, and he discovered from it that she had a

lover.(671) A courtesan accused St. Gregory Thaumaturgus of having been

her lover, and having refused to pay her what he had promised. He paid the

required sum, but she was immediately possessed by a daemon.(672) The

efforts of the saints to reclaim courtesans from the path of vice created

a large class of legends. St. Mary Magdalene, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Afra,

St. Pelagia, St. Thais, and St. Theodota, in the early Church, as well as

St. Marguerite of Cortona, and Clara of Rimini, in the middle ages, had

been courtesans.(673) St. Vitalius, it is said, was accustomed every night

to visit the dens of vice in his neighbourhood, to give the inmates money

to remain without sin for that night, and to offer up prayers for their

conversion.(674) It is related of St. Serapion, that, as he was passing

through a village in Egypt, a courtesan beckoned to him. He promised at a

certain hour to visit her. He kept his appointment, but declared that

there was a duty which his order imposed on him. He fell down on his knees

and began repeating the Psalter, concluding every psalm with a prayer for

his hostess. The strangeness of the scene, and the solemnity of his tone

and manner, overawed and fascinated her. Gradually her tears began to

flow. She knelt beside him and began to join in his prayers. He heeded her

not, but hour after hour continued in the same stern and solemn voice,

without rest and without interruption, to repeat his alternate prayers and

psalms, till her repentance rose to a paroxysm of terror, and, as the grey

morning streaks began to illumine the horizon, she fell half dead at his

feet, imploring him with broken sobs to lead her anywhere where she might

expiate the sins of her past.(675)

But the services rendered by the ascetics in imprinting on the minds of

men a profound and enduring conviction of the importance of chastity,

though extremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their noxious

influence upon marriage. Two or three beautiful descriptions of this

institution have been culled out of the immense mass of the patristic

writings;(676) but, in general, it would be difficult to conceive anything

more coarse or more repulsive than the manner in which they regarded

it.(677) The relation which nature has designed for the noble purpose of

repairing the ravages of death, and which, as Linnæus has shown, extends

even through the world of flowers, was invariably treated as a consequence

of the fall of Adam, and marriage was regarded almost exclusively in its

lowest aspect. The tender love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful

domestic qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely

omitted from consideration.(678) The object of the ascetic was to attract

men to a life of virginity, and, as a necessary consequence, marriage was

treated as an inferior state. It was regarded as being necessary, indeed,

and therefore justifiable, for the propagation of the species, and to free

men from greater evils; but still as a condition of degradation from which

all who aspired to real sanctity should fly. To “cut down by the axe of

Virginity the wood of Marriage,” was, in the energetic language of St.

Jerome, the end of the saint;(679) and if he consented to praise marriage,

it was merely because it produced virgins.(680) Even when the bond had

been formed, the ascetic passion retained its sting. We have already seen

how it embittered other relations of domestic life. Into this, the holiest

of all, it infused a tenfold bitterness. Whenever any strong religious

fervour fell upon a husband or a wife, its first effect was to make a

happy union impossible. The more religious partner immediately desired to

live a life of solitary asceticism, or at least, if no ostensible

separation took place, an unnatural life of separation in marriage. The

immense place this order of ideas occupies in the hortatory writings of

the Fathers, and in the legends of the saints, must be familiar to all who

have any knowledge of this department of literature. Thus—to give but a

very few examples—St. Nilus, when he had already two children, was seized

with a longing for the prevailing asceticism, and his wife was persuaded,

after many tears, to consent to their separation.(681) St. Ammon, on the

night of his marriage, proceeded to greet his bride with an harangue upon

the evils of the married state, and they agreed, in consequence, at once

to separate.(682) St. Melania laboured long and earnestly to induce her

husband to allow her to desert his bed, before he would consent.(683) St.

Abraham ran away from his wife on the night of his marriage.(684) St.

Alexis, according to a somewhat later legend, took the same step, but many

years after returned from Jerusalem to his father’s house, in which his

wife was still lamenting her desertion, begged and received a lodging as

an act of charity, and lived there unrecognised and unknown till his

death.(685) St. Gregory of Nyssa—who was so unfortunate as to be

married—wrote a glowing eulogy of virginity, in the course of which he

mournfully observed that this privileged state could never be his. He

resembled, he assures us, an ox that was ploughing a field, the fruit of

which he must never enjoy; or a thirsty man, who was gazing on a stream of

which he never can drink; or a poor man, whose poverty seems the more

bitter as he contemplates the wealth of his neighbours; and he proceeded

to descant in feeling terms upon the troubles of matrimony.(686) Nominal

marriages, in which the partners agreed to shun the marriage bed, became

not uncommon. The emperor Henry II., Edward the Confessor, of England, and

Alphonso II., of Spain, gave examples of it. A very famous and rather

picturesque history of this kind is related by Gregory of Tours. A rich

young Gaul, named Injuriosus, led to his home a young bride to whom he was

passionately attached. That night, she confessed to him, with tears, that

she had vowed to keep her virginity, and that she regretted bitterly the

marriage into which her love for him had betrayed her. He told her that

they should remain united, but that she should still observe her vow; and

he fulfilled his promise. When, after several years, she died, her

husband, in laying her in the tomb, declared, with great solemnity, that

he restored her to God as immaculate as he had received her; and then a

smile lit up the face of the dead woman, and she said, “Why do you tell

that which no one asked you?” The husband soon afterwards died, and his

corpse, which had been laid in a distinct compartment from that of his

wife in the tomb, was placed side by side with it by the angels.(687)

The extreme disorders which such teaching produced in domestic life, and

also the extravagances which grew up among some heretics, naturally

alarmed the more judicious leaders of the Church, and it was ordained that

married persons should not enter into an ascetic life, except by mutual

consent.(688) The ascetic ideal, however, remained unchanged. To abstain

from marriage, or in marriage to abstain from a perfect union, was

regarded as a proof of sanctity, and marriage was viewed in its coarsest

and most degraded form. The notion of its impurity took many forms, and

exercised for some centuries an extremely wide influence over the Church.

Thus, it was the custom during the middle ages to abstain from the

marriage bed during the night after the ceremony, in honour of the

sacrament.(689) It was expressly enjoined that no married persons should

participate in any of the great Church festivals if the night before they

had lain together, and St. Gregory the Great tells of a young wife who was

possessed by a dæmon, because she had taken part in a procession of St.

Sebastian, without fulfilling this condition.(690) The extent to which the

feeling on the subject was carried is shown by the famous vision of

Alberic in the twelfth century, in which a special place of torture,

consisting of a lake of mingled lead, pitch, and resin is represented as

existing in hell for the punishment of married people who had lain

together on Church festivals or fast days.(691)

Two other consequences of this way of regarding marriage were a very

strong disapproval of second marriages, and a very strong desire to secure

celibacy in the clergy. The first of these notions had existed, though in

a very different form, and connected with very different motives, among

the early Romans, who were accustomed, we are told, to honour with the

crown of modesty those who were content with one marriage, and to regard

many marriages as a sign of illegitimate intemperance.(692) This opinion

appears to have chiefly grown out of a very delicate and touching feeling

which had taken deep root in the Roman mind, that the affection a wife

owes her husband is so profound and so pure that it must not cease even

with his death; that it should guide and consecrate all her subsequent

life, and that it never can be transferred to another object. Virgil, in

very beautiful lines, puts this sentiment into the mouth of Dido;(693) and

several examples are recorded of Roman wives, sometimes in the prime of

youth and beauty, upon the death of their husbands, devoting the remainder

of their lives to retirement and to the memory of the dead.(694) Tacitus

held up the Germans as in this respect a model to his countrymen,(695) and

the epithet “univiræ” inscribed on many Roman tombs shows how this

devotion was practised and valued.(696) The family of Camillus was

especially honoured for the absence of second marriages among its

members.(697) “To love a wife when living,” said one of the latest Roman

poets, “is a pleasure; to love her when dead is an act of religion.”(698)

In the case of men, the propriety of abstaining from second marriages was

probably not felt so strongly as in the case of women, and what feeling on

the subject existed was chiefly due to another motive—affection for the

children, whose interests, it was thought, might be injured by a

stepmother.(699)

The sentiment which thus recoiled from second marriages passed with a

vastly increased strength into ascetic Christianity, but it was based upon

altogether different grounds. We find, in the first place, that an

affectionate remembrance of the husband had altogether vanished from the

motives of the abstinence. In the next place, we may remark that the

ecclesiastical writers, in perfect conformity with the extreme coarseness

of their views about the sexes, almost invariably assumed that the motive

to second or third marriages must be simply the force of the animal

passions. The Montanists and the Novatians absolutely condemned second

marriages.(700) The orthodox pronounced them lawful, on account of the

weakness of human nature, but they viewed them with the most emphatic

disapproval,(701) partly because they considered them manifest signs of

incontinence, and partly because they regarded them as inconsistent with

their doctrine that marriage is an emblem of the union of Christ with the

Church. The language of the Fathers on this subject appears to a modern

mind most extraordinary, and, but for their distinct and reiterated

assertion that they considered these marriages permissible,(702) would

appear to amount to a peremptory condemnation. Thus—to give but a few

samples—digamy, or second marriage, is described by Athenagoras as “a

decent adultery.”(703) “Fornication,” according to Clement of Alexandria,

“is a lapse from one marriage into many.”(704) “The first Adam,” said St.

Jerome, “had one wife; the second Adam had no wife. They who approve of

digamy hold forth a third Adam, who was twice married, whom they

follow.”(705) “Consider,” he again says, “that she who has been twice

married, though she be an old, and decrepit, and poor woman, is not deemed

worthy to receive the charity of the Church. But if the bread of charity

is taken from her, how much more that bread which descends from

heaven!”(706) “Digamists,” according to Origen, “are saved in the name of

Christ, but are by no means crowned by him.”(707) “By this text,” said St.

Gregory Nazianzen, speaking of St. Paul’s comparison of marriage to the

union of Christ with the Church, “second marriages seem to me to be

reproved. If there are two Christs there may be two husbands or two wives.

If there is but one Christ, one Head of the Church, there is but one

flesh—a second is repelled. But if he forbids a second, what is to be said

of third marriages? The first is law, the second is pardon and indulgence,

the third is iniquity; but he who exceeds this number is manifestly

bestial.”(708) Digamists were excluded from the priesthood and from the

distributions of Church charity; a period of penance was imposed on them

before they were admitted to communion,(709) and two English statutes of

the Middle Ages withheld the benefit of clergy from any prisoner who had

“married two wives or one widow.”(710) The Council of Illiberis, in the

beginning of the fourth century, while in general condemning baptism by

laymen, permitted it in case of extreme necessity; but provided that even

in that case the officiating layman must not have been twice married.(711)

Among the Greeks fourth marriages were at one time deemed absolutely

unlawful, and much controversy was excited by the Emperor Leo the Wise,

who, having had three wives, had taken a mistress, but afterwards, in

defiance of the religious feelings of his people, determined to raise her

to the position of a wife.(712)

The subject of the celibacy of the clergy, in which the ecclesiastical

feelings about marriage were also shown, is an extremely large one, and I

shall not attempt to deal with it, except in a most cursory manner.(713)

There are two facts connected with it which every candid student must

admit. The first is, that in the earliest period of the Church, the

privilege of marriage was accorded to the clergy. The second is, that a

notion of the impurity of marriage existed, and that it was felt that the

clergy, as pre-eminently the holy class, should have less licence than

laymen. The first form this feeling took appears in the strong conviction

that a second marriage of a priest, or the marriage of a priest with a

widow, was unlawful and criminal.(714) This belief seems to have existed

from the earliest period of the Church, and was retained with great

tenacity and unanimity through many centuries. In the next place, we find

from an extremely early date an opinion, that it was an act of virtue, at

a later period that it was an act of duty, for priests after ordination to

abstain from cohabiting with their wives. The Council of Nice refrained,

by the advice of Paphnutius, who was himself a scrupulous celibate, from

imposing this last rule as a matter of necessity;(715) but in the course

of the fourth century it was a recognised principle that clerical

marriages were criminal. They were celebrated, however, habitually, and

usually with the greatest openness. The various attitudes assumed by the

ecclesiastical authorities in dealing with this subject form an extremely

curious page of the history of morals, and supply the most crushing

evidence of the evils which have been produced by the system of celibacy.

I can at present, however, only refer to the vast mass of evidence which

has been collected on the subject, derived from the writings of Catholic

divines and from the decrees of Catholic Councils during the space of many

centuries. It is a popular illusion, which is especially common among

writers who have little direct knowledge of the middle ages, that the

atrocious immorality of monasteries, in the century before the

Reformation, was a new fact, and that the ages when the faith of men was

undisturbed, were ages of great moral purity. In fact, it appears, from

the uniform testimony of the ecclesiastical writers, that ecclesiastical

immorality in the eighth and three following centuries was little if at

all less outrageous than in any other period, while the Papacy, during

almost the whole of the tenth century, was held by men of infamous lives.

Simony was nearly universal.(716) Barbarian chieftains married at an early

age, and totally incapable of restraint, occupied the leading positions in

the Church, and gross irregularities speedily became general. An Italian

bishop of the tenth century epigrammatically described the morals of his

time, when he declared, that if he were to enforce the canons against

unchaste people administering ecclesiastical rites, no one would be left

in the Church except the boys; and if he were to observe the canons

against bastards, these also must be excluded.(717) The evil acquired such

magnitude that a great feudal clergy, bequeathing the ecclesiastical

benefices from father to son, appeared more than once likely to

arise.(718) A tax called “Culagium,” which was in fact a licence to

clergymen to keep concubines, was during several centuries systematically

levied by princes.(719) Sometimes the evil, by its very extension,

corrected itself. Priestly marriages were looked upon as normal events not

implying any guilt, and in the eleventh century several instances are

recorded in which they were not regarded as any impediment to the power of

working miracles.(720) But this was a rare exception. From the earliest

period a long succession of Councils as well as such men as St. Boniface,

St. Gregory the Great, St. Peter Damiani, St. Dunstan, St. Anselm,

Hildebrand and his successors in the Popedom, denounced priestly marriage

or concubinage as an atrocious crime, and the habitual life of the priests

was, in theory at least, generally recognised as a life of sin.

It is not surprising that, having once broken their vows and begun to live

what they deemed a life of habitual sin, the clergy should soon have sunk

far below the level of the laity. We may not lay much stress on such

isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXIII., who was

condemned among many other crimes for incest, and for adultery;(721) or

the abbot-elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found, on

investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single

village;(722) or an abbot of St. Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved

to have kept no less than seventy concubines;(723) or Henry III., Bishop

of Liège, who was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate

children;(724) but it is impossible to resist the evidence of a long chain

of Councils and ecclesiastical writers, who conspire in depicting far

greater evils than simple concubinage. It was observed that when the

priests actually took wives the knowledge that these connections were

illegal was peculiarly fatal to their fidelity, and bigamy and extreme

mobility of attachments were especially common among them. The writers of

the middle ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels,

of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls, and of that

inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy, which rendered it

necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that

priests should not be permitted to live with their mothers or sisters.

Unnatural love, which it had been one of the great services of

Christianity almost to eradicate from the world, is more than once spoken

of as lingering in the monasteries; and, shortly before the Reformation,

complaints became loud and frequent of the employment of the confessional

for the purposes of debauchery.(725) The measures taken on the subject

were very numerous and severe. At first, the evil chiefly complained of

was the clandestine marriage of priests, and especially their intercourse

with wives whom they had married previous to their ordination. Several

Councils issued their anathemas against priests “who had improper

relations with their wives;” and rules were made that priests should

always sleep in the presence of a subordinate clerk; and that they should

only meet their wives in the open air and before at least two witnesses.

Men were, however, by no means unanimous in their way of regarding this

matter. Synesius, when elected to a bishopric, at first declined, boldly

alleging as one of his reasons, that he had a wife whom he loved dearly,

and who, he hoped, would bear him many sons, and that he did not mean to

separate from her or visit her secretly as an adulterer.(726) A Bishop of

Laon, at a later date, who was married to a niece of St. Rémy, and who

remained with his wife till after he had a son and a daughter, quaintly

expressed his penitence by naming them respectively Latro and

Vulpecula.(727) St. Gregory the Great describes the virtue of a priest,

who, through motives of piety, had discarded his wife. As he lay dying,

she hastened to him to watch the bed which for forty years she had not

been allowed to share, and, bending over what seemed the inanimate form of

her husband, she tried to ascertain whether any breath still remained,

when the dying saint, collecting his last energies, exclaimed, “Woman,

begone; take away the straw; there is fire yet.”(728) The destruction of

priestly marriage is chiefly due to Hildebrand, who pursued this object

with the most untiring resolution. Finding that his appeals to the

ecclesiastical authorities and to the civil rulers were insufficient, he

boldly turned to the people, exhorted them, in defiance of all Church

traditions, to withdraw their obedience from married priests, and kindled

among them a fierce fanaticism of asceticism, which speedily produced a

fierce persecution of the offending pastors. Their wives, in immense

numbers, were driven forth with hatred and with scorn; and many crimes,

and much intolerable suffering, followed the disruption. The priests

sometimes strenuously resisted. At Cambrai, in A.D. 1077, they burnt alive

as a heretic a zealot who was maintaining the doctrines of Hildebrand. In

England, half a century later, they succeeded in surprising a Papal legate

in the arms of a courtesan, a few hours after he had delivered a fierce

denunciation of clerical unchastity.(729) But Papal resolution supported

by popular fanaticism won the victory. Pope Urban II. gave licence to the

nobles to reduce to slavery the wives whom priests had obstinately refused

to abandon, and after a few more acts of severity priestly marriage became

obsolete. The extent, however, of the disorders that still existed, is

shown by the mournful confessions of ecclesiastical writers, by the

uniform and indignant testimony of the poets and prose satirists who

preceded the Reformation, by the atrocious immoralities disclosed in the

monasteries at the time of their suppression, and by the significant

prudence of many lay Catholics, who were accustomed to insist that their

priest should take a concubine for the protection of the families of his

parishioners.(730)

It is scarcely possible to conceive a more demoralising influence than a

priesthood living such a life as I have described. In Protestant

countries, where the marriage of the clergy is fully recognised, it has,

indeed, been productive of the greatest and the most unequivocal benefits.

Nowhere, it may be confidently asserted, does Christianity assume a more

beneficial or a more winning form than in those gentle clerical households

which stud our land, constituting, as Coleridge said, “the one idyll of

modern life,” the most perfect type of domestic peace, the centre of

civilisation in the remotest village. Notwithstanding some class

narrowness and professional bigotry, notwithstanding some unworthy, but

half unconscious mannerism, which is often most unjustly stigmatised as

hypocrisy, it would be difficult to find in any other quarter so much

happiness at once diffused and enjoyed, or so much virtue attained with so

little tension or struggle. Combining with his sacred calling a warm

sympathy with the intellectual, social, and political movements of his

time, possessing the enlarged practical knowledge of a father of a family,

and entering with a keen zest into the occupations and the amusements of

his parishioners, a good clergyman will rarely obtrude his religious

convictions into secular spheres, but yet will make them apparent in all.

They will be revealed by a higher and deeper moral tone, by a more

scrupulous purity in word and action, by an all-pervasive gentleness,

which refines, and softens, and mellows, and adds as much to the charm as

to the excellence of the character in which it is displayed. In visiting

the sick, relieving the poor, instructing the young, and discharging a

thousand delicate offices for which a woman’s tact is especially needed,

his wife finds a sphere of labour which is at once intensely active and

intensely feminine, and her example is not less beneficial than her

ministrations.

Among the Catholic priesthood, on the other hand, where the vow of

celibacy is faithfully observed, a character of a different type is

formed, which with very grave and deadly faults combines some of the

noblest excellences to which humanity can attain. Separated from most of

the ties and affections of earth, viewing life chiefly through the

distorted medium of the casuist or the confessional, and deprived of those

relationships which more than any others soften and expand the character,

the Catholic priests have been but too often conspicuous for their fierce

and sanguinary fanaticism, and for their indifference to all interests

except those of their Church; while the narrow range of their sympathies,

and the intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them peculiarly

unfitted for the office of educating the young, which they so persistently

claim, and which, to the great misfortune of the world, they were long

permitted to monopolise. But, on the other hand, no other body of men have

ever exhibited a more single-minded and unworldly zeal, refracted by no

personal interests, sacrificing to duty the dearest of earthly objects,

and confronting with undaunted heroism every form of hardship, of

suffering, and of death.

That the middle ages, even in their darkest periods, produced many good

and great men of the latter type it would be unjust and absurd to deny. It

can hardly, however, be questioned that the extreme frequency of illicit

connections among the clergy tended during many centuries most actively to

lower the moral tone of the laity, and to counteract the great services in

the cause of purity which Christian teaching had undoubtedly effected. The

priestly connections were rarely so fully recognised as to enable the

mistress to fill a position like that which is now occupied by the wife of

a clergyman, and the spectacle of the chief teachers and exemplars of

morals living habitually in an intercourse which was acknowledged to be

ambiguous or wrong, must have acted most injuriously upon every class of

the community. Asceticism, proclaiming war upon human nature, produced a

revulsion towards its extreme opposite, and even when it was observed it

was frequently detrimental to purity of mind. The habit of continually

looking upon marriage in its coarsest light, and of regarding the

propagation of the species as its one legitimate end, exercised a

peculiarly perverting influence upon the imagination. The exuberant piety

of wives who desired to live apart from their husbands often drove the

latter into serious irregularities.(731) The notion of sin was introduced

into the dearest of relationships,(732) and the whole subject was

distorted and degraded. It is one of the great benefits of Protestantism

that it did much to banish these modes of thought and feeling from the

world, and to restore marriage to its simplicity and its dignity. We have

a gratifying illustration of the extent to which an old superstition has

declined, in the fact that when Goldsmith, in his great romance, desired

to depict the harmless eccentricities of his simple-minded and unworldly

vicar, he represented him as maintaining that opinion concerning the

sinfulness of the second marriage of a clergyman which was for many

centuries universal in the Church.

Another injurious consequence, resulting, in a great measure, from

asceticism, was a tendency to depreciate extremely the character and the

position of women. In this tendency we may detect in part the influence of

the earlier Jewish writings, in which an impartial observer may find

evident traces of the common Oriental depreciation of women. The custom of

purchase-money to the father of the bride was admitted. Polygamy was

authorised,(733) and practised by the wisest man on an enormous scale. A

woman was regarded as the origin of human ills. A period of purification

was appointed after the birth of every child; but, by a very significant

provision, it was twice as long in the case of a female as of a male

child.(734) “The badness of men,” a Jewish writer emphatically declared,

“is better than the goodness of women.”(735) The types of female

excellence exhibited in the early period of Jewish history are in general

of a low order, and certainly far inferior to those of Roman history or

Greek poetry; and the warmest eulogy of a woman in the Old Testament is

probably that which was bestowed upon her who, with circumstances of the

most aggravated treachery, had murdered the sleeping fugitive who had

taken refuge under her roof.

The combined influence of the Jewish writings, and of that ascetic feeling

which treated women as the chief source of temptation to man, was shown in

those fierce invectives, which form so conspicuous and so grotesque a

portion of the writings of the Fathers, and which contrast so curiously

with the adulation bestowed upon particular members of the sex. Woman was

represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She

should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live

in continual penance, on account of the curses she has brought upon the

world. She should be ashamed of her dress, for it is the memorial of her

fall. She should be especially ashamed of her beauty, for it is the most

potent instrument of the dæmon. Physical beauty was indeed perpetually the

theme of ecclesiastical denunciations, though one singular exception seems

to have been made; for it has been observed that in the middle ages the

personal beauty of bishops was continually noticed upon their tombs.(736)

Women were even forbidden by a provincial Council, in the sixth century,

on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked

hands.(737) Their essentially subordinate position was continually

maintained.

It is probable that this teaching had its part in determining the

principles of legislation concerning the sex. The Pagan laws during the

Empire had been continually repealing the old disabilities of women, and

the legislative movement in their favour continued with unabated force

from Constantine to Justinian, and appeared also in some of the early laws

of the barbarians.(738) But in the whole feudal legislation women were

placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan Empire.(739) In

addition to the personal restrictions which grew necessarily out of the

Catholic doctrines concerning divorce, and concerning the subordination of

the weaker sex, we find numerous and stringent enactments, which rendered

it impossible for women to succeed to any considerable amount of property,

and which almost reduced them to the alternative of marriage or a

nunnery.(740) The complete inferiority of the sex was continually

maintained by the law; and that generous public opinion which in Rome had

frequently revolted against the injustice done to girls, in depriving them

of the greater part of the inheritance of their fathers, totally

disappeared. Wherever the canon law has been the basis of legislation, we

find laws of succession sacrificing the interests of daughters and of

wives,(741) and a state of public opinion which has been formed and

regulated by these laws; nor was any serious attempt made to abolish them

till the close of the last century. The French revolutionists, though

rejecting the proposal of Siéyès and Condorcet to accord political

emancipation to women, established at least an equal succession of sons

and daughters, and thus initiated a great reformation of both law and

opinion, which sooner or later must traverse the world.

In their efforts to raise the standard of purity, the Christian teachers

derived much assistance from the incursions and the conquests of the

barbarians. The dissolution of vast retinues of slaves, the suspension of

most public games, and the general impoverishment that followed the

invasions, were all favourable to female virtue; and in this respect the

various tribes of barbarians, however violent and lawless, were far

superior to the more civilised community. Tacitus, in a very famous work,

had long before pourtrayed in the most flattering colours the purity of

the Germans. Adultery, he said, was very rare among them. The adulteress

was driven from the house with shaven hair, and beaten ignominiously

through the village. Neither youth, nor beauty, nor wealth could enable a

woman who was known to have sinned to secure a husband. Polygamy was

restricted to the princes, who looked upon a plurality of wives rather as

a badge of dignity than as a gratification of the passions. Mothers

invariably gave suck to their own children. Infanticide was forbidden.

Widows were not allowed to re-marry. The men feared captivity, much more

for their wives than for themselves; they believed that a sacred and

prophetic gift resided in women; they consulted them as oracles, and

followed their counsels.(742)

It is generally believed, and it is not improbable, that Tacitus in this

work intended to reprove the dissolute habits of his fellow-countrymen,

and considerably over-coloured the virtue of the barbarians. Of the

substantial justice, however, of his picture we have much evidence.

Salvian, who, about three centuries later, witnessed and described the

manners of the barbarians who had triumphed over the Empire, attested in

the strongest language the contrast which their chastity presented to the

vice of those whom they had subdued.(743) The Scandinavian mythology

abounds in legends exhibiting the clear sentiment of the heathen tribes on

the subject of purity, and the awful penalties threatened in the next

world against the seducers.(744) The barbarian women were accustomed to

practise medicine and to interpret dreams, and they also very frequently

accompanied their husbands to battle, rallied their broken forces, and

even themselves took part in the fight.(745) Augustus had discovered that

it was useless to keep barbarian chiefs as hostages, and that the one way

of securing the fidelity of traitors was by taking their wives, for these,

at least, were never sacrificed. Instances of female heroism are said to

have occurred in the conquered nations, which might rival the most

splendid in the Roman annals. When Marius had vanquished an army of the

Teutons, their wives besought the conqueror to permit them to become the

servants of the Vestal Virgins, in order that their honour, at least,

might be secure in slavery. Their request was refused, and that night they

all perished by their own hands.(746) A powerful noble once solicited the

hand of a Galatian lady named Camma, who, faithful to her husband,

resisted all his entreaties. Resolved at any hazard to succeed, he caused

her husband to be assassinated, and when she took refuge in the temple of

Diana, and enrolled herself among the priestesses, he sent noble after

noble to induce her to relent. After a time, he ventured himself into her

presence. She feigned a willingness to yield, but told him it was first

necessary to make a libation to the goddess. She appeared as a priestess

before the altar, bearing in her hand a cup of wine, which she had

poisoned. She drank half of it herself, handed the remainder to her guilty

lover, and when he had drained the cup to the dregs, burst into a fierce

thanksgiving, that she had been permitted to avenge, and was soon to

rejoin, her murdered husband.(747) Another and still more remarkable

instance of conjugal fidelity was furnished by a Gaulish woman named

Epponina. Her husband, Julius Sabinus, had rebelled against Vespasian; he

was conquered, and might easily have escaped to Germany, but could not

bear to abandon his young wife. He retired to a villa of his own,

concealed himself in subterranean cellars that were below it, and

instructed a freedman to spread the report that he had committed suicide,

while, to account for the disappearance of his body, he set fire to the

villa. Epponina, hearing of the suicide, for three days lay prostrate on

the ground without eating. At length the freedman came to her, and told

her that the suicide was feigned. She continued her lamentations by day,

but visited her husband by night. She became with child, but owing, it is

said, to an ointment, she succeeded in concealing her state from her

friends. When the hour of parturition was at hand, she went alone into the

cellar, and without any assistance or attendance was delivered of twins,

whom she brought up underground. For nine years she fulfilled her task,

when Sabinus was discovered, and, to the lasting disgrace of Vespasian,

was executed, in spite of the supplications of his wife, who made it her

last request that she might be permitted to die with him.(748)

The moral purity of the barbarians was of a kind altogether different from

that which the ascetic movement inculcated. It was concentrated

exclusively upon marriage. It showed itself in a noble conjugal fidelity;

but it was little fitted for a life of celibacy, and did not, as we have

seen, prevent excessive disorders among the priesthood. The practice of

polygamy among the barbarian kings was also for some centuries unchecked,

or at least unsuppressed, by Christianity. The kings Caribert and

Chilperic had both many wives at the same time.(749) Clotaire married the

sister of his first wife during the lifetime of the latter, who, on the

intention of the king being announced, is reported to have said, “Let my

lord do what seemeth good in his sight, only let thy servant live in thy

favour.”(750) Theodebert, whose general goodness of character is warmly

extolled by the episcopal historian, abandoned his first wife on account

of an atrocious crime which she had committed; took, during her lifetime,

another, to whom he had previously been betrothed; and upon the death of

this second wife, and while the first was still living, took a third,

whom, however, at a later period he murdered.(751) St. Columbanus was

expelled from Gaul chiefly on account of his denunciations of the polygamy

of King Thierry.(752) Dagobert had three wives, as well as a multitude of

concubines.(753) Charlemagne himself had at the same time two wives, and

he indulged largely in concubines.(754) After this period examples of this

nature became rare. The Popes and the bishops exercised a strict

supervision over domestic morals, and strenuously, and in most cases

successfully, opposed the attempts of kings and nobles to repudiate their

wives.

But, notwithstanding these startling facts, there can be no doubt that the

general purity of the barbarians was from the first superior to that of

the later Romans, and it appears in many of their laws. It has been very

happily observed,(755) that the high value placed on this virtue is well

illustrated by the fact that in the Salic code, while a charge of

cowardice falsely brought against a man was only punished by a fine of

three solidi, a charge of unchastity falsely brought against a woman was

punished by a fine of forty-five. The Teutonic sentiment was shown in a

very stern legislation against adultery and rape,(756) and curiously

minute precautions were sometimes taken to guard against them. A law of

the Spanish Visigoths prohibited surgeons from bleeding any free woman

except in the presence of her husband, of her nearest relative, or at

least of some properly appointed witness, and a Salic law imposed a fine

of fifteen pieces of gold upon any one who improperly pressed her

hand.(757)

Under the influence of Christianity, assisted by the barbarians, a vast

change passed gradually over the world. The vice we are considering was

probably more rare; it certainly assumed less extravagant forms, and it

was screened from observation with a new modesty. The theory of morals had

become clearer, and the practice was somewhat improved. The extreme

grossness of literature had disappeared, and the more glaring violations

of marriage were always censured and often repressed. The penitential

discipline, and the exhortations of the pulpit, diffused abroad an

immeasurably higher sense of the importance of purity than Pagan antiquity

had known. St. Gregory the Great, following in the steps of some Pagan

philosophers,(758) strenuously urged upon mothers the duty of themselves

suckling their children; and many minute and stringent precepts were made

against extravagances of dress and manners. The religious institutions of

Greece and Asia Minor, which had almost consecrated prostitution, were for

ever abolished, and the courtesan sank into a lower stage of degradation.

Besides these changes, the duty of reciprocal fidelity in marriage was

enforced with a new earnestness. The contrast between the levity with

which the frailty of men has in most ages been regarded, and the extreme

severity with which women who have been guilty of the same offence have

generally been treated, forms one of the most singular anomalies in moral

history, and appears the more remarkable when we remember that the

temptation usually springs from the sex which is so readily pardoned; that

the sex which is visited with such crushing penalties is proverbially the

most weak; and that, in the case of women, but not in the case of men, the

vice is very commonly the result of the most abject misery and poverty.

For this disparity of censure several reasons have been assigned. The

offence can be more surely and easily detected, and therefore more

certainly punished, in the case of women than of men; and, as the duty of

providing for his children falls upon the father, the introduction into

the family of children who are not his own is a special injury to him,

while illegitimate children who do not spring from adultery will probably,

on account of their father having entered into no compact to support them,

ultimately become criminals or paupers, and therefore a burden to

society.(759) It may be added, I think, that several causes render the

observance of this virtue more difficult for one sex than for the other;

that its violation, when every allowance has been made for the moral

degradation which is a result of the existing condition of public opinion,

is naturally more profoundly prejudicial to the character of women than of

men; and also that much of our feeling on these subjects is due to laws

and moral systems which were formed by men, and were in the first instance

intended for their own protection.

The passages in the Fathers, asserting the equality of the obligation

imposed upon both sexes, are exceedingly unequivocal;(760) and although

the doctrine itself had been anticipated by Seneca and Plutarch, it had

probably never before, and it has never since, been so fully realised as

in the early Church. It cannot, however, be said that the conquest has

been retained. At the present day, although the standard of morals is far

higher than in Pagan Rome, it may be questioned whether the inequality of

the censure which is bestowed upon the two sexes is not as great as in the

days of Paganism, and that inequality is continually the cause of the most

shameful and the most pitiable injustice. In one respect, indeed, a great

retrogression resulted from chivalry, and long survived its decay. The

character of the seducer, and especially of the passionless seducer who

pursues his career simply as a kind of sport, and under the influence of

no stronger motive than vanity or a spirit of adventure, has been

glorified and idealised in the popular literature of Christendom in a

manner to which we can find no parallel in antiquity. When we reflect that

the object of such a man is by the coldest and most deliberate treachery

to blast the lives of innocent women; when we compare the levity of his

motive with the irreparable injury he inflicts; and when we remember that

he can only deceive his victim by persuading her to love him, and can only

ruin her by persuading her to trust him, it must be owned that it would be

difficult to conceive a cruelty more wanton and more heartless, or a

character combining more numerous elements of infamy and of dishonour.

That such a character should for many centuries have been the popular

ideal of a considerable section of literature, and the boast of numbers

who most plume themselves upon their honour, is assuredly one of the most

mournful facts in history, and it represents a moral deflection certainly

not less than was revealed in ancient Greece by the position that was

assigned to the courtesan.

The fundamental truth, that the same act can never be at once venial for a

man to demand, and infamous for a woman to accord, though nobly enforced

by the early Christians, has not passed into the popular sentiment of

Christendom. The mystical character, however, which the Church imparted to

marriage has been extremely influential. Partly by raising it into a

sacrament, and partly by representing it as, in some mysterious and not

very definable sense, an image of the union of Christ with His Church, a

feeling was fostered that a lifelong union of one man and one woman is,

under all circumstances, the single form of intercourse between the sexes

which is not illegitimate; and this conviction has acquired the force of a

primal moral intuition.

There can, I think, be little doubt that, in the stringency with which it

is usually laid down, it rests not upon the law of nature, but upon

positive law, although unassisted nature is sufficient to lead men many

steps in its direction. Considering the subject simply in the light of

unaided reason, two rules comprise the whole duty of man. He must abstain

from whatever injures happiness or degrades character. Under the first

head, he must include the more remote as well as the immediate

consequences of his act. He must consider how his partner will be affected

by the union, the light in which society will view the connection, the

probable position of the children to be born, the effect of these births,

and also the effect of his example upon the well-being of society at

large. Some of the elements of this calculation vary in different stages

of society. Thus, public opinion in one age will reprobate, and therefore

punish, connections which, in another age, are fully sanctioned; and the

probable position of the children, as well as the effect of the births

upon society, will depend greatly upon particular and national

circumstances.

Under the second head is comprised the influence of this intercourse in

clouding or developing the moral feelings, lowering or elevating the tone

of character, exciting or allaying the aberrations of the imagination,

incapacitating men for pure affections or extending their range, making

the animal part of our nature more or less predominant. We know, by the

intuition of our moral nature, that this predominance is always a

degraded, though it is not always an unhappy, condition. We also know that

it is a law of our being, that powerful and beautiful affections, which

had before been latent, are evoked in some particular forms of union,

while other forms of union are peculiarly fitted to deaden the affections

and to pervert the character.

In these considerations we have ample grounds for maintaining that the

lifelong union of one man and of one woman should be the normal or

dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it is on

the whole most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral

elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive, be

impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special revelation.

It by no means follows that because this should be the dominant type it

should be the only one, or that the interests of society demand that all

connections should be forced into the same die. Connections, which were

confessedly only for a few years, have always subsisted side by side with

permanent marriages; and in periods when public opinion, acquiescing in

their propriety, inflicts no excommunication on one or both of the

partners, when these partners are not living the demoralising and

degrading life which accompanies the consciousness of guilt, and when

proper provision is made for the children who are born, it would be, I

believe, impossible to prove, by the light of simple and unassisted

reason, that such connections should be invariably condemned. It is

extremely important, both for the happiness and for the moral well-being

of men, that lifelong unions should not be effected simply under the

imperious prompting of a blind appetite. There are always multitudes who,

in the period of their lives when their passions are most strong, are

incapable of supporting children in their own social rank, and who would

therefore injure society by marrying in it, but are nevertheless perfectly

capable of securing an honourable career for their illegitimate children

in the lower social sphere to which these would naturally belong. Under

the conditions I have mentioned, these connections are not injurious, but

beneficial, to the weaker partner; they soften the differences of rank,

they stimulate social habits, and they do not produce upon character the

degrading effect of promiscuous intercourse, or upon society the injurious

effects of imprudent marriages, one or other of which will multiply in

their absence. In the immense variety of circumstances and characters,

cases will always appear in which, on utilitarian grounds, they might seem

advisable.

It is necessary to dwell upon such considerations as these, if we would

understand the legislation of the Pagan Empire or the changes that were

effected by Christianity. The legislators of the Empire distinctly

recognised these connections, and made it a main object to authorise,

dignify, and regulate them. The unlimited licence of divorce practically

included them under the name of marriage, while that name sheltered them

from stigma, and prevented many of the gravest evils of unauthorised

unions. The word concubine also, which in the Republic had the same

signification as among ourselves, represented in the Empire a strictly

legal union—an innovation which was chiefly due to Augustus, and was

doubtless intended as part of the legislation against celibacy, and also,

it may be, as a corrective of the licentious habits that were general.

This union was in essentials merely a form of marriage, for he who, having

a concubine, took to himself either a wife or another concubine, was

legally guilty of adultery. Like the commonest form of marriage, it was

consummated without any ceremony, and was dissoluble at will. Its

peculiarities were that it was contracted between men of patrician rank

and freedwomen, who were forbidden by law to intermarry; that the

concubine, though her position was perfectly recognised and honourable,

did not share the rank of her partner, that she brought no dowry, and that

her children followed her rank, and were excluded from the rank and the

inheritance of their father.(761)

Against these notions Christianity declared a direct and implacable

warfare, which was imperfectly reflected in the civil legislation, but

appeared unequivocally in the writings of the Fathers, and in most of the

decrees of the Councils.(762) It taught, as a religious dogma, invariable,

inflexible, and independent of all utilitarian calculations, that all

forms of intercourse of the sexes, other than lifelong unions, were

criminal. By teaching men to regard this doctrine as axiomatic, and

therefore inflicting severe social penalties and deep degradation on

transient connections, it has profoundly modified even their utilitarian

aspect, and has rendered them in most countries furtive and disguised.

There is probably no other branch of ethics which has been so largely

determined by special dogmatic theology, and there is none which would be

so deeply affected by its decay.