painter Apelles, and flourished nearly a century after her more
celebrated namesake. She too lived at Corinth, and was famous for her
beauty and her association with distinguished men. She was born out of
wedlock, and the names of both her father and mother are unknown. As she
grew up, a waif in the dissolute city, Apelles, the celebrated painter,
is said to have been the first to have noticed her budding beauty and to
have educated her. According to the prevailing tradition, Apelles saw
her when, as a young girl, she was drawing water from the fountain
Pirene, and was at once so captivated by her beauty that he took her
with him to a banquet whither he was going. When his friends jestingly
reproached him because, instead of bringing a hetaera, as was usual, he
had brought a child to the feast, he rejoined: "Be not surprised. I will
show her again to you before three years have passed; you can then see
how beautiful and vivacious she has become."
Before this period had passed, Lais became the most celebrated hetaera of
the city. Her name was on everyone's lips, in the baths, in the
theatres, and on the streets and public squares. Her fame spread
throughout Hellas, and the richest men of Hellas flocked to Corinth.
She was surpassed in the number and prominence of her lovers only by her
contemporary, Phryne of Athens.
When at the height of her triumph, this celebrated and petted hetaera,
"who inflamed all Hellas with love, and for whose favors two seas
contended," suddenly disappeared from the scene of her conquests. A
Thessalian, by name Hippolochus, had taught her the meaning of true
love. She fled with him from the company of her other lovers, and lived
in honorable marriage in Thessaly. Her beauty, however, caused a sad
ending to this pleasing romance. From envy and jealousy, the Thessalian
women enticed her into the temple of Aphrodite and there stoned her to
death. Some historians relate that she had many Thessalian lovers; this
aroused the jealousy of the women, and they took her life at a festival
of Aphrodite at which no men were present. After her murder, a
pestilence is said to have broken out in Thessaly, which did not end
until in expiation a temple had been erected to Aphrodite.
Phryne was the most beautiful woman of all antiquity. She was born at
Thespiae in Boeotia, but flourished at Athens toward the latter part of
the fourth century before our era. The name Phryne belongs essentially
to the history of Greek art, for all her life was associated with the
activities of the most eminent painters and sculptors. In her youth she
was loved by the sculptor Praxiteles. Pausanias tells a story how "once
when Phryne asked for the most beautiful of his works, Praxiteles,
lover-like, promised to give it to her, but would not tell which he
thought the most beautiful. So a servant of Phryne ran in, declaring
that the sculptor's studio had caught fire, and that most, but not all,
of his works had perished. Praxiteles at once ran for the door,
protesting that all his labor was lost if the flames had reached the
_Satyr_ and the _Love_. But Phryne bade him stay and be of good cheer,
telling him that he had suffered no loss, but had only been entrapped
into saying which were the most beautiful of his works. So she chose the
_Love_."
Either this or a similar statue of Eros was dedicated by Phryne in
Thespiae, the city of her birth. Later, Praxiteles made of her a statue
of gold, which was set up at Delphi between those of two kings. She also
served as his model for the celebrated Aphrodite of Cnidos, which Pliny
describes as "the finest statue, not only by Praxiteles, but in the
whole world." The inhabitants of Cnidos placed the image, which they
believed had been made under the direct inspiration of the goddess of
love herself, in a beautiful shrine surrounded by myrtle trees, so
arranged that the figure might be seen from many different points of
view; "and from all sides," adds Pliny, "it was equally admired." Hither
came Greeks from all parts of the world merely to behold the statue and
to worship at the shrine of the goddess. King Nicomedes of Bithynia, in
his eagerness to possess the statue, offered to pay for it the whole
public debt of the island, which was enormous; but the Cnidians
preferred to suffer anything rather than give up their treasure; and
with good reason, "for by that statue Praxiteles made Cnidos famous."
Writers of epigrams were fond of extolling the statue; and many of the
extant statues of Venus are but replicas or adaptations of this great
prototype, modelled after the form of Phryne. The most celebrated copy
of the Cnidian statue is in the Vatican, disfigured, however, by false
drapery. The statue gives us some idea of the superlative beauty of
Phryne. It is very pure, very unconscious of its charms, and captivates
the beholder by its simple grace and naturalness. Lucian, the aesthetic
critic, in the construction of his ideal statue selected for description
the head of the Aphrodite of Cnidos. He particularly admired the finely
pencilled telling him that he had suffered no loss, but had only been
entrapped into saying which were the most beautiful of his works. So she
chose the _Love_."
Either this or a similar statue of Eros was dedicated by Phryne in
Thespiae, the city of her birth. Later, Praxiteles made of her a statue
of gold, which was set up at Delphi between those of two kings. She also
served as his model for the celebrated Aphrodite of Cnidos, which Pliny
describes as "the finest statue, not only by Praxiteles, but in the
whole world." The inhabitants of Cnidos placed the image, which they
believed had been made under the direct inspiration of the goddess of
love herself, in a beautiful shrine surrounded by myrtle trees, so
arranged that the figure might be seen from many different points of
view; "and from all sides," adds Pliny, "it was equally admired." Hither
came Greeks from all parts of the world merely to behold the statue and
to worship at the shrine of the goddess. King Nicomedes of Bithynia, in
his eagerness to possess the statue, offered to pay for it the whole
public debt of the island, which was enormous; but the Cnidians
preferred to suffer anything rather than give up their treasure; and
with good reason, "for by that statue Praxiteles made Cnidos famous."
Writers of epigrams were fond of extolling the statue; and many of the
extant statues of Venus are but replicas or adaptations of this great
prototype, modelled after the form of Phryne. The most celebrated copy
of the Cnidian statue is in the Vatican, disfigured, however, by false
drapery. The statue gives us some idea of the superlative beauty of
Phryne. It is very pure, very unconscious of its charms, and captivates
the beholder by its simple grace and naturalness. Lucian, the aesthetic
critic, in the construction of his ideal statue selected for description
the head of the Aphrodite of Cnidos. He particularly admired the finely
pencilled eyebrows and the melting gaze of the eyes, with their sweet,
joyous expression.
Phryne, with a modesty one would not expect in a woman of her class, was
very careful to keep her beautiful figure concealed, avoiding the public
baths and having her body always enveloped in a long and graceful tunic.
But on two occasions the beauty-loving Greeks had displayed to them the
charms of her person. The first was at the solemn assembly at Eleusis,
on the feast of the Poseidonia. Having loosened her beautiful hair and
let fall her drapery, Phryne plunged into the sea in the sight of all
the assembled Greeks. Apelles, the painter, transported with admiration
at the sight, retired at once to his studio and transferred to canvas
the mental image which was indelibly impressed upon his fancy; and the
resulting picture was the _Aphrodite Anadyomene_, the most celebrated of
his paintings.
The second exhibition was before the austere court of the Heliasts.
Phryne had been cited to appear before the tribunal on the charge of
profaning the Eleusinian mysteries, and Hyperides, the brilliant young
orator, was her advocate. Failing to move the judges by his arguments,
he tore the tunic from her bosom and revealed to them the perfection of
her figure. The judges, beholding as it were the goddess of love
incarnate, and moved by a superstitious fear, could not dare to condemn
to death "a prophetess and priestess of Aphrodite." They saw and they
pardoned, and, amid the applause of the people, Phryne was carried in
triumph to the temple of Aphrodite. To us in this day such a scene
appears highly theatrical, but Aphrodite is no longer esteemed among
men, and the Greek worship of beauty is something not understood in this
material age.
Phryne's life was by no means free from blame, and as the result of her
popularity she acquired great riches. She is said to have offered to
rebuild the walls of Thebes, which had been torn down by Alexander, on
condition that she might place on them the inscription: _Alexander
destroyed Thebes; but Phryne, the hetaera, rebuilt it;_ but the offer was
rejected, showing that though the times were corrupt, yet shame had not
altogether departed from men.
One cannot emphasize in too trenchant terms the demoralizing influences
of hetairism on the social life of the Greeks, or fail to see in the
gross immorality of the sexes one of the paramount causes of the
downfall of the Greek peoples.
Yet it is a truism that feminine shamelessness was most advantageous for
the arts of sculpture and painting. Sensuousness is close akin to
sensuality, and from their passion for these "priestesses of Aphrodite"
the Greek artists, without doubt, derived much of their inspiration,
while the opportunities which hetairism offered for the study of the
female form enabled Praxiteles and his contemporaries and successors to
produce masterpieces which equalled in idealism the works of aesthetic
art produced in the preceding century.
To become the ideal for the painter and the sculptor was the greatest
ambition of the beautiful and cultivated hetaera. In permitting the
artist to portray her charms she not only performed a lasting service
for art, but she also rendered herself celebrated and immortal. The fame
of her beauty was spread throughout all Hellenic lands, and the national
devotion to the goddess Aphrodite was at once extended to her earthly
counterpart. If she united intellectual brilliancy with beauty, fortune
at once cast its most precious gifts at her feet. The most celebrated
men of every city contested for her favors, poets made her the theme of
their verses, artists portrayed her charms with chisel and with brush,
and the wealthy filled her coffers with gold and precious stones.
XI
THE WOMAN QUESTION IN ANCIENT ATHENS
Anyone who makes a careful perusal of the philosophical literature of
Athens in the fourth century before our era will be struck with the
amount of attention that has been paid to the question of the social and
domestic position of woman. If he trace the subject back, he will
observe that in the dramatic literature of the latter part of the
previous century the same problems received the consideration of
Euripides and Aristophanes. And the conviction will be forced upon him
that this agitation was rooted in a sociological movement of great
import, and that the dramatic and philosophical writers merely gave a
literary form to the debates which profoundly stirred Athenian society
in the fifth century.
This discussion of woman's rights is a subject of perennial interest,
and the underlying currents in such movements are usually the same in
every age. They take their rise, too, not in the efforts of
philanthropic men who recognize that the status of woman is not what it
should be, but in the efforts of the members of the sex themselves, who
are sufficiently intelligent to see that they, while having an abundant
share of the burdens, have not a fair share of the emoluments of life,
and consequently endeavor to better the conditions which environ
themselves and their sisters.
In this chapter we shall make a study of the dramatists and philosophers
of Athens, in so far as they give insight into the social life of the
city in its most important epoch, and outline what they contribute to
our knowledge of Greek woman and the ever-present Woman Question.
For the early part of this brilliant period we must rely on the ideal
pictures of tragedy for the higher side, and the ribald travesties of
comedy for the lower side of feminine life, AEschylus flourished just
before and during the glorious period following the Persian War,--the
good days before the influx of foreigners and the new education
corrupted the life and undermined the faith of the citizens. In his
seven extant plays he has presented to us only three feminine characters
of any importance,--Clytemnestra, Electra, and Cassandra,--all belonging
to the cycle of tragedies treating of the fate of King Agamemnon and his
royal house at Mycenae. The dramatist's pictures of home life show his
high conception of the ability and the importance of women and of the
large part they play in human history. His Clytemnestra is a ruling
queen exercising all the functions of royalty, but her powerful nature
has been debased by grief and sin. She identifies herself with the
"ancient bitter Alastor," who visits on Agamemnon the curse of his
house. She is self-sufficingness, adamantine purpose, studied craft, and
cold disdain incarnate. With fulsome speech and consummate flattery she
welcomes her husband home; and when the deed is done and he lies dead by
her hand, in exultant tones she rejoices in the blood upon her robe as
"a cornfield in the dews of spring." Truly she is the most powerful
portrait of feminine guilt that dramatic literature affords us. AEschylus
drew his scenery and his characters largely from the conditions of the
Heroic Age as pictured by Homer, and was little affected by the current
of everyday life about him.
As AEschylus has given us Clytemnestra for an ideal type of feminine
power and wickedness, so Sophocles has presented two immortal heroines,
Antigone and Electra, who are statuesque in the beauty and grandeur of
their characters. In Antigone we observe two fundamental
qualities,--enthusiasm in the performance of duty, and intensity of
domestic affection, as seen in her efforts to reconcile her brothers,
Polynices and Eteocles, her desire to shield her sister Ismene, her
self-sacrifice for the sake of her brother Polynices, and her filial
devotion to her aged father. Electra also is an ideal type of sisterly
love. Ill-treated by her unnatural mother, abused by the cowardly and
brutal tyrant who had usurped her father's place, only one ray of hope
was left her, that her brother Orestes would return to avenge their
wrongs upon the guilty pair. When the deed is done, and Orestes is
pursued by the Furies, she proves herself a devoted and unselfish
sister. In these two characters we have sublime conceptions of heroic
devotion to duty, but the more human womanly traits have been lost in
the poet's delineation of them as the embodiment of lofty ideals.
Mahaffy finds in these two heroines something hard and masculine, traits
which would not stir the sympathies of the reader or hearer and lead to
emulation. He prefers Sophocles's Deianira and Tecmessa as being "truly
'female women,' as Homer would say, gentle and loving, not above
jealousy, and for that reason a finer and clearer contrast to the heroes
than are the coarser and more dominant heroines." ... "If these
criticisms be just," he adds, "they will show that, in the most perfect
and exclusive Athenian society--that is to say, among Thucydides's and
Sophocles's set, the ideal of female character had degenerated; that to
these men, whose affections were centred on very different objects, the
notion of a true heroine was no longer natural, but was supplanted by a
hard and masculine type. The old free, noble woman, whom AEschylus had,
in early days, still known, was banished from their city life to make
way for the domestic slave of the Attic household, called 'mistress,'
but as such contrasted with the 'companions,' who gradually supplanted
her in Athenian society."
The types of womanhood presented by AEschylus and Sophocles belonged to a
state of society which had passed away, and were too remote from the
life of their own day to be ideals for the daughters of Athens. These
dramatists did not touch upon the problems which were then engaging the
thoughts of enlightened men and women. There is nothing in AEschylus,
absorbed as he was in the problems of destiny, to show that he felt the
many weighty problems that confronted the social life of his time; and
the serene Sophocles gives no hint that the world about him was not the
best of all possible worlds. But how was it with the sombre and
melancholy Euripides? What insight does he give us into the social life
of the times?
There was a famous saying of Sophocles that "he himself represented men
as they ought to be--Euripides, men as they are." This means that
Euripides, while making the old legends the foundation of his tragedies,
attributed to his heroes and heroines the faults and passions of
ordinary men and women and utilized his plots to present the problems
which confronted society as he knew it. As a follower of Anaxagoras and
a member of the party of philosophers, he was dissatisfied with the
conditions of life about him, and endeavored, through his dramas, to
assist the movements for reform. He was, in many respects, a daring
innovator, and this explains the bitter hostility which Aristophanes,
the ultra-conservative, exhibited toward him. The glaring fault in
Athenian social life was the status of woman, and to the solution of
this problem Euripides bent all his energies. He used woman and the
moral conflicts originating through the relations of the sexes as a
_motif_ for his poetry, and the whole body of his plays is a commentary
on the Woman Question. He found in the portrayal of woman a new field
for his genius, as well as a new means of advocating an unpopular but
righteous cause.
Yet we are confronted by the prevailing opinion that Euripides was a
woman hater who utilized his tragedies to present his unfavorable
opinion of the sex. This view, presented by many modern writers, rests,
however, on false assumptions. To exhibit the low views of woman held by
the men of his day, the poet attributes to certain of his characters
condemnations of the sex as a whole; and these are taken to be
expressions of the personal opinion of the author. Thus Hippolytus
engages in a lengthy tirade beginning:
"Why hast thou given a home beneath the sun,
Zeus, unto woman, specious curse to man?"
[Illustration 232 _PHRYNE After the painting by Henry I. Siemiradsky.
Phryne, with a modesty one would not expect in a woman of her class, was
very careful to keep her beautiful figure concealed, avoiding the public
baths and having her body always enveloped in a long and graceful tunic.
But on two occasions the beauty-loving Greeks had displayed to them the
charms of her person. The fist was at the solemn assembly at Eleusis, on
the feast of the Poseidonia. Having loosened her beautiful hair and let
fall her drapery, Phryne plunged into the sea in the sight of all the
assembled Greeks._
_Phryne was of very humble origin, and originally obtained her
livelihood by gathering capers; but her beauty afterward gained great
wealth for her. At Delphi there was erected a statue in gold of her._]
But Hippolytus throughout is characterized as a pronounced misogynist,
and this and similar passages found their inspiration in the characters
and the situation and produce a well-defined dramatic effect.
Furthermore, while the poet's unfavorable opinions of women are
frequently cited out of their connection, his complimentary expressions
are lost sight of. In contrast to the harsh criticisms of men who vent
their spleen against those whom they have injured, or of women who find
fault with their sex where the dramatic purpose justifies the
expressions used, there can be cited passages in which maidenly modesty
and wifely fidelity are commended; or one might quote the deeply
emotional words of Admetus or Theseus concerning the joys of happy
married life, or the tender expressions which fathers, like Agamemnon,
utter in reference to their daughters. In the fragments also occur
passages friendly and unfriendly to woman, but, as these are without
their context, it is difficult to judge them fairly. Hence the
conclusion from a study of the dialogues of Euripides is that every
unfavorable judgment of woman finds its full justification in the
economy of the drama; nowhere is there convincing indication that the
poet himself had any hatred for the sex.
If we turn from the dialogues to the choruses, we may expect to find the
author's true opinions, and here occur no traces whatever of unfriendly
criticism. Male choruses sing of the unbounded happiness which is gained
in the possession of a good wife; female choruses sing of entrancing
love, of the blessings of a happy married life, while faithlessness and
sinful passion are condemned. They refer at times to evil report
concerning women, but always with indignation and in manifest effort to
correct a wrong judgment. Thus, for example, the chorus of the _Ion_:
"Mark--ye whose strains of slander
Scourge evermore
Woman in song, and brand her
Wanton and whore,--
How high in virtue's place
We pass men's lawless race,
Nor spit in viper-lays your venom-store.
But let the Muse of taunting
On men's heads pour
Her indignation, chanting
Her treason-lore;
Sing of the outraged maid;
Tell of the wife betrayed
Of him who hath displayed his false heart's core--"
The nature of the characters of Euripides is the most important of all
the testimony of the plays as evidence of the social life of Athens,
since the poet drew them from real life, and consequently his men and
his women are necessarily fair specimens of the men and women to be
found in Athenian society. It is noticeable that the men are, as a rule,
far inferior to the women, both in manners and in nobility of character,
and are not to be compared with the heroes of AEschylus and Sophocles.
Hippolytus is indeed a notable example of youthful purity; Pylades, of
unselfish friendship; Achilles, of courtly chivalry; Ion, of youthful
piety; Theseus, of devoted patriotism; and the peasant husband of
Electra, of knightly regard; but the majority of the male characters are
selfish, quarrelsome, and ordinary. How different do we find the case
when we consider the dramatist's women!
Differing from his countrymen in the conception of the character,
capabilities, and rights of woman, Euripides has in his plays presented
ideals of a womanhood which would give woman something higher to live
for than the drudgery of household duties, and would raise the sex in
the estimation of men. Heroism in everyday life is the lesson he
constantly teaches by the examples of such women as Alcestis, the
devoted wife and mother; as Polyxena, the brave martyr-maiden; as
Andromache, faithful in thraldom to the memory of her valiant husband;
as Macaria and Iphigenia, sacrificing themselves for the sake of a great
cause; and as Electra, the devoted sister. Nowhere can one find a longer
catalogue of noble women, not heroines of prehistoric days living in a
golden age, but women who in character and sentiments were like to those
met with every day in every community. Euripides's heart was burdened by
the sorrows and wrongs of the sex; and he combated the social system
which was at the root of the evil, not by violent assaults upon it, not
by seeking to overturn that which was the product of centuries and was
a natural result of the Greek idea of the city-state, but by showing
women how they could better their condition and by giving men more
exalted ideas of the nature of woman. Says Mr. Arthur S. Way, the
translator and ardent advocate of Euripides, who, of all Greek scholars,
has most profoundly and sympathetically investigated this question: