Woman's Rights in Ancient Athens

THE Athens of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, which may properly enough be called the Periclean Athens, has been an extinct community for more than two thousand years, and yet it is more intimately known to the scholar of the present day in all its aspects, social, political, religious, artistic, and literary, than any foreign city which he has not visited. Such a preservative power had the mind of Athens in its best days to embalm that most singular and unequalled community permanently in human memory, and keep its lineaments alive in the scholar’s and thinker’s imagery. Especially is this true since Germany has not only revived the study of Hellenic literature in a perfectly sympathetic and appreciative spirit, but has actually taken up the rudely broken thread of Athenian reflective and speculative thought where it ceased its investigations so many centuries ago,

interrupted by national calamity, subjugation, and decay, and has carried it on, after so long a lapse of time, in the exact spirit of its great masters, a long way towards its legitimate results and conclusions. The great German Hellenists have brought the old Acropolitan city under the steady glow of a strong calcium light, as it were, so that we can see the every-day life of its streets and understand the current topics which were agitating its restless, voluble, and contemptuous populace. The literature of the best days of Athens which has been spared to us is hardly more voluminous than the works of a brace of English or French sensational novelists ; but these priceless relics are peculiar. They are all alive, dramatic, and still warm with the breath of the loquacious old demos, out of which they sprung and which they delineate so vividly. Most of the Attic writers seem to be mere stenographic reporters of the current and endless talk of the assembly, the courts of law, tne schools of philosophy, the fish-market and Piræus, and the æsthetic saloons of the leading Athenian eupatrids and millionnaires. The garrulity of the Athenians was irrepressible. As Cleon says to Demos, —

And such talk ! Plato’s works are all dialogue. After reading half a dozen of his leading pieces, such as the Plædo, Gorgias, Protagoras, Phædrus, etc., you begin to feel the Athenian spirit strong upon you, and, if the thing were possible, are ready to become an intelligent metic, or naturalized citizen of the Attic metropolis. The remains of the ten Attic orators are, of course, all talk, living words still warm, though the lungs and lips which uttered them have so long been dust. Even the Attic historians, whose business is narration, are so impatient of it that they are constantly introducing their leading characters as spokesmen, and letting them tell what is going on, viva voce, as if mere dead impersonal narrative were an impertinence, and nothing but the spoken words of the actors stenographed were worthy to be reported in the historic page. The Athenians, says Wieland, as quoted by Mitchell, were so well aware of the advantages which their wit, their volubility of tongue, and their higher cultivation gave them over the other Greeks, that this self-consciousness actually impressed itself on their features, and produced a sort of bold, confident, shameless look, by which an Athenian citizen was easily distinguished from a stranger. “ What’s that you say ? ” was an expression in common use at Athens, to let the stranger know that his answers were very dull to Athenian ears. The Periclean Athens was an intensely luminous point in the far depth of the world’s historic foretime. Indeed, without the Ionian Herodotus the foretime of which we speak would have been for us pretty much a blank. The radiance of Athens enables us to see, not only itself, but the barbarous outlying world, which without it would have been left in eclipse. The Athens of the time of which we are speaking was indeed an anomaly and unaccountable phenomenon in the then social world. All we know is, that such a peerless community flowered and blossomed there in those far-off gloomy and lonely ages. Outside were peoples who had yet hardly emerged into historic beings, if we except certain barbaric empires and theocracies or sacerdocies, in which the development of the reason was utterly oppressed and checked by the dictates of a so-called divine authority. One of these huge aggregates of irrational Asiatic power and superstition precipitated itself en masse on little Athens, to quench the spark of intelligence and the hopes of a rational civilization indefinitely; but the plucky little Ægean commonwealth, through the consummate strategy of her greatest man of action, sent the million-headed Oriental brute back, howling and in dismay, to his lair ; and so we people of the nineteenth century know that the earth revolves around the sun, and travel by steam, and publish news by the aid of lightning, and are capable of free governments, and enjoy free thought and free speech on all subjects whatsoever. Thanks to Themistocles ! So that he did not “ save his land in vain,” after all, as Byron alleges. The Periclean Athens may be called an anachronism, an anticipation and foretaste of a remote and at that time seemingly impossible future, the point of departure of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, prematurely introduced into the world’s chronology, before the world was ready for it, and long, long before its civilization could find the least possible chance of full and perfect development. Those orators talked with such eloquence ; those philosophers discoursed and reasoned so indefatigably, subtilely, profoundly, and truly on man in all his relations and on every branch of his mysterious nature and on his mysterious final destiny, and they theorized so sagaciously on the best organization, on the aims and possibilities of human society ; and those poets sang so spontaneously, sweetly, and sublimely; and those historians wrote so that their works are truly possessions forever ; and yet they were to find no listeners or readers, no fit audience or intelligent public capable of appreciating their ideas fully and acting upon them, until their very dust had been blown for ages round about the globe, and their fatherland, the hieron pedon, or sacred soil, as Sophocles calls it, of illustrious Athens, a worn and barren desolation, had become the haunt of a robber spawn of barbarous interlopers, with not a drop of Hellenic blood in their veins, thank Heaven! to make the scholar of to-day hang his head for shame at the degradation of the poor relics of his beloved city and its outlying region. The poet sings,

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by JAMES R. OSGOOD & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

But this New Athens will be like the New Jerusalem, an ideal city of the soul and inner life, and not a material one. The same prophetic eye saw also

But this brighter ideal Hellas will be the civilized world, living in the allpenetrating light of universal intelligence. In fact, it is only in the nineteenth century that the Attic ideal of a political community founded in right reason, social and political equality, and common sense has become practicable and is being actually realized (as we would fain hope and believe, in spite of many dark omens) on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, so far away in space and time from its glorious archetypal Demos. Do not the following words of Pericles, uttered in the fifth century B. c., sound strangely from the lips of a man of that period? “We live,” said Pericles, “under a constitution such as noway to envy the laws of our neighbors, ourselves an example to others rather than mere imitators. It is called a democracy, since its permanent aim tends toward the many and not towards the few. In regard to private matters and disputes the laws deal equally with every man ; while looking to public affairs and to claims of individual influence, every man’s chance of advancement is determined, not by party favor, but by real worth, according as his reputation stands in his own particular department ; nor does poverty or obscure station keep him back, if he really has the means of benefiting the city. We are not intolerant or angry with our neighbor for what he may do to please himself. Thus conducting our private, social intercourse with reciprocal indulgence, we are restrained from wrong on public matters by fear and reverence of our magistrates for the time being, and of our laws, especially such laws as are instituted for the protection of wrongful sufferers, and even such as, though not written, are enforced by a common sense of shame. Besides this we have provided for our minds numerous recreations from toil,” especially at the Dionysia, which occurred in spring and were the theatric season, when there were tragedies in the morning and comedies in the afternoon. The Dionysiac festival was religious, and also a great fair crowded with buyers and sellers. “ From the magnitude of our city,” says Pericles, “ the products of the whole earth are brought to us, so that our enjoyment of foreign luxuries is as much our own and assured as of those which we grow at home..... We apply no xenelasy (exclusion of foreigners) to exclude even an enemy either from any lesson or any spectacle, the full view of which he may think advantageous to him ; for we trust less to manœuvres and quackery than to our native bravery for warlike efficiency. While the Lacedemonians subject themselves to an irksome exercise from their earliest youth for the attainment of courage, we, with our easy habits of life, are not less prepared than they to encounter all perils within the measure of our strength. Now if we are willing to brave danger just as much under an indulgent system as under constant toil, and by spontaneous courage as under force of law, we are gainers in the end by not vexing ourselves beforehand with sufferings to come, yet still appearing in the hour of trial not less daring than those who toil without ceasing. We combine elegance of taste with simplicity of life, and we pursue knowledge without being enervated..... Nor is it disgraceful to any one who is poor to confess his poverty, though he may rather incur reproach for not actually keeping himself out of poverty,” — literally, “ the not exerting one’s self to escape poverty is disgraceful.” “ The magistrates who discharge public trusts fulfil their domestic duties also ; the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs ; for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter, not as harmless, but useless.” Read this rebuke from the lips of Pericles, ye superfine Americans, who shirk your political duties on election days, from fear of being soiled by contact with the unwashed public, and so leave the demagogues an easy triumph ! “ Moreover,” continues the Attic orator, “ we always hear and pronounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps strike out for ourselves correct reasonings about them ; far from accounting discussion an impediment to action. For in truth we combine in the most remarkable manner these two qualities, — extreme boldness in execution with full debate beforehand on that which we are going about; whereas with others ignorance alone imports boldness, debate introduces hesitation. Assuredly those men are properly to be regarded as the stoutest of heart who, knowing most pracisely both the terrors of war and the sweets of peace, are still not the less willing to encounter peril. In fine, I affirm that our city, considered as a whole, is the schoolmistress of Greece.” ¹

Now let us grant that in these most remarkable passages the oratorical Jove of Athens was using a good deal of blarney and Sam Slickian soft-sawder towards his susceptible constituents ; let us grant that in fact Athens, at the very time he speaks of or soon after, became so infested with a vile herd of sycophants or common informers, that a multitude of its wealthy citizens found it convenient to reside in the outlying colonies, where they had mines or other possessions, to escape being perpetually fleeced by the vermin in question ; grant that the mass of Athenian citizens were, in practice, a most jealous, envious set of levellers and radicals, fond of listening to demagogues, when they hawked at noble prey ; grant, above all, that that world-renowned instance of mean popular envy, bigotry, and intolerance was soon to occur, and the great spirit of Socrates, the martyr of the cup of hemlock, was soon to ascend to another life, as the sun descended behind the Athenian hills, to give the lie to the claim of Pericles in regard to his fellow-citizens’ tolerance ; grant also that the Athenian treatment of foreigners resident among them was in many respects invidious ; — still the remarkable thing is, that an Athenian statesman, in the fifth century B. C. could even imagine such a political community as he describes Athens actually to have been at that time. Said we not rightly, therefore, that the Athens of the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. was an anachronism ? In fact it was in some marked respects a community of New England Yankees, prematurely appearing in the recesses of the Eastern Mediterranean ; and the history of Athens will never be properly written, except by an American scholar. Mr. Grote, it is true, is in such entire sympathy with that fierce old democracy as to smooth over its faults on every and all occasions, and he himself is a man of Periclean or Websterian breadth of mind ; but he has never lived in a community of the Athenian sort, as a New England scholar may be said to have done. In the above Periclean sketch we have all the traits of American democracy carried out in the spirit of its letter, and as it has actually been realized in New England, namely, the social and political equality of all citizens ; fondness for stump oratory and political discussion, and an average public capable of forming its own political opinions and discharging the duties of public office, as well as shrewd managers of their own private affairs ; tolerance of difference of opinion ; a love of trade and commerce ; a readiness to admit foreigners to citizenship ; and lastly, a degree of intelligence which has made New England the democratic exemplar and schoolmistress of the rest of the United States. This may be said without arrogance, because it is a fact. But further than this, an enemy of the Athenians, in summing up their character, said that “they were made neither to be quiet themselves nor to let the rest of the world be so,” thus assimilating them exactly to our modern Yankees in their fondness for innovation, social and political. In fact, the devising of ideal commonwealths, and the discussion of public and private ethics with a view to legislation, were as rife among the free-thinkers of Athens in the fifth century B. c. as they are in its modern Transatlantic counterpart and literary namesake, the Hub. Furthermore, a fish might have been suspended with as much propriety over the deliberations of the ancient Athenian Ecclesia as over those of the Great and General Court in the State House of this Commonwealth. For the Athenians were as great fishermen as our Cape Ann folks, and were immoderately fond of a fish diet, which accounts perhaps for their startling intellectual brilliancy and apprehensiveness, on the theory of Professor Agassiz. Food and fish, says Mitchell, were synonymous terms among the Athenians, Salt fish constituted the principal food of the Attic soldiers and sailors. Prodigious quantities were imported from the Euxine. When the bell of the fish-market rang, everybody rushed thither, leaving the sophists and orators in the middle of their harangues without an audience; and the Athenian Billingsgate, like that of modern London, was noted for the scurrilous tongues of its dealers. A story is told of an Attic orator who was unfortunately in the middle of his “ few feeble remarks ” when the fish-market bell rang. There was an instant stampede of his entire audience, with one solitary exception, who, to the surprise of the speaker, “ stuck.” In pure gratitude he thanked his solitary listener, at the same time explaining the cause of the stampede. It turned out that the fellow was deaf, and as soon as he ascertained that the fishmongers’ bell had rung he too fled, leaving the eloquent speaker soliloquizing to vacancy.

We have already alluded to modern German speculative thought, particularly the critical philosophy of Germany, which has so revolutionized opinion in all directions in our time, as a genuine continuation of that of the Periclean age. Chalybaus, in his “ Historical Survey of Speculative Philosophy, from Kant to Hegel,” truly says there exists, historically speaking, only a Grecian and German philosophy; the latter has sprung up within the bosom of Christian education ; for everything that was new and not ancient in the mental reformation of Europe is of Teutonic origin. Speculative thought and science both have at length shaken themselves completely free of the surveillance of dogmatic theology, and now emulate the Hellenic freedom of investigation. In the salon of Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Zeno, and Protagoras broached speculative tenets which made them the lineal intellectual ancestors of the great modern German philosophers. Aristotle, too, as a physicist and political economist, foreshadowed Cuvier, Owen, Darwin, Smith, Mill, etc. But to show how modern the Athens of that far period was, and how much like Boston of Anno Domini 1870, we find in the old Attic comedy a full-blown woman’s-rights movement not only foreshadowed, but represented as actually consummated and successful. It is true that the old Attic comedy, as it survives in the works of Aristophanes, can hardly be handled by even the most unscrupulous modern without tongs and gloves ; still it is so full of wit and living pictures of that strange Athenian people, who, in the language of Mitchell, imagined, with the Indian, that his own little valley comprehended the whole world (and Attica did at the time comprehend nearly the whole world, possessed of historic significance), and that the sun rose on one side of it only to set on the other, that it is worthy of the careful study of the historical student, even if he is obliged to fumigate himself afterwards by way of disinfecting himself of the ethnic taint. The mediæval monks of a classical and literary turn are said to have scratched their ears in a peculiar manner when they wanted to read a pagan author. Already, as early as the time of Pericles, the dryrot of Grecian civilization had manifested itself. We discern no traces of it in the heroic foretime as depicted by Homer. There was guilty love then as there is now, but no abominations. As for the women of the heroic time of Greece, if there was a Clytemnestra, a Medea, and a Phædra among them, there was also an Andromache, a Penelope, an Antigone, and a Helen ; for the latter, as delineated by Homer, was a perfect lady, beautiful in soul and heart as well as in person. By no consent of hers was it that her peerless loveliness was used as a sort of loaded dice by Idalian Aphrodite to play against her rivals Herfe and Pallas. She was a poor victim caught in the meshes of the higher powers, and everywhere subsequently to her fall ap pears as a conscience - stricken lady, “ most deject and miserable,” and constantly expressing self - contempt and loathing for her involuntary deflection from rectitude. The Athenian dramatic poets and Virgil, the ascetic misogynist, with the Iliad and Odyssey in their hands, were foul slanderers of unavoidable misfortune when they misrepresented Helen’s character. Some extenuation may be urged in favor of her Athenian traducers, on the ground of their jealousy of the exquisite beauty of the Spartan women from Helen downwards, so superior to that of their Ionian rivals. But the dramatic poets of the later and socially corrupt days of Greece could not appreciate the feminine purity of the heroic time of Hellas or even of its earlier historic period. But of this more anon.

The free play of the reason and an insatiable spirit of inquiry were the characteristics of that period which we may call the Periclean age, as they are of the nineteenth century. At length Jerusalem, the mystical and fanatical, and Rome, the dogmatic and superstitious, are retiring into the background, and Athens, the rational and harmonious, re-emerges star-bright. What are the facts at present in the intellectual world ? The best thought of the age is Attic, and the best scholars and thinkers of the time are remarkable for their Attic culture and spirit. All the great German poets, thinkers, and savans of the age just past were Greeks, and the living poets, thinkers, and savans of England are the same, namely, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Grote, Huxley, Mill, Darwin, etc. Rationalism puts its subjects of all ages in sympathy and en rapport.

The word “liberty” (eleutheria) was as familiar a sound to the Athenian ear as it is to our own. Shelley, who was the inspired prophet and minstrel of freedom and of woman’s enfranchisement also, was an Athenian in his exquisite genius and in every fibre of his intellectual nature. He was a worthy pupil of the great Athenian masters of philosophy and “ gorgeous tragedy.” Of his beloved city he sings : —

Socrates first ransacked the consciousness and inner nature of man, and found in the higher reason that sense of justice, truth, beauty, and virtue which makes the civilized man at least independent of gross material symbols, showing him that it is within that he must look for first principles, for those higher laws which, according to Sophocles, are engendered in celestial air and cannot become antiquated or null, because the deity is in them and grows not old.

But to our immediate subject, woman’s rights in Athens. Singularly enough, Aristophanes represents that an Athenian lady by the name of Lysistrata anticipated the peace movement lately inaugurated by our own feminine reformers, which is to put an end to war in France, and finally pacify the world, as long ago as the year 411 B. c. in Athens. To secure peace Lysistrata organized the women of that city into a body politic to take the destinies of Athens into their own hands. The Peloponnesian war had then been raging for twenty years. It was two years after the fatal Sicilian expedition, about which every school-boy has read in his Greek Reader. All the old men of Athens were in arms as a home guard. Athens was much in the condition of its modern French counterpart, Paris, with one vital exception. The country population had all been driven into the city, and Attica had been ravaged clear up to the walls of its capital by annual and semiannual raids of the Laced&3230;monians and their allies. The farmers of the fruitful borough of Acharnæ in the highlands had long ago seen their beehives, olivetrees, and other agricultural resources swept out of existence by a ruthless foe, and were grumbling inside the walls because they had to buy every necessary of life, which they used to get without money and without price on their rural estates. But fortunately Athens, unlike modern Paris, had an outlet and an inlet by the sea, where she was supreme. She then held the maritime sceptre of the world, and could issue out of Piræus with her fleet to levy tribute on all her island dependencies, or revenge herself by descents on the Peloponnesian coast for the ravages perpetrated in her own borders. At the time we speak of elderly Athenian citizens did their marketing armed cap-à-pie in complete armor. At this juncture it was when the Grecian states seemed bent on exterminating each other from the face of the earth, that the strong-minded Athenian lady, Lysistrata, “ wife of a magistrate, takes it into her head to attempt a pacification between the belligerents. She summons a council of women, who come to a decision to expel their husbands from their beds until they conclude a peace. In the mean time the elder women are commissioned to seize the Acropolis and make themselves mistresses of the money which had been stowed therein for the purposes of war. Their design succeeds, and the husbands are reduced to a terrible plight by the novel resolution of their wives. Ambassadors at length come from the belligerent parties and peace is concluded with the greatest despatch, under the direction of the clever Lysistrata.” ² There are passages in this comedy which show that the heroine Lysistrata, if living now, would be able to champion the cause of woman’s rights and woman’s suffrage with as much wit, keenness of repartee, eloquence, and states-womanship as the foremost of our platform women. When under the direction of Lysistrata the Athenian women had seized the Acropolis with its deposit of cash and turned the key on said deposit, leaving it in the custody of the locum-tenens, the sacred serpent of Pallas, and had womanned the walls, an old fogy senator or counsellor appears on the scene (we follow Bohn’s literal prose translation of the comedy, taking such liberties with it, and making such additions as are necessary to make it intelligible to the English reader), and wants to know of Lysistrata, “ in the name of Jove, Madam,” what she means by shutting up “our” citadel with her bolts. The members of the Athenian Senate or Council were the keepers of the public treasury. “To keep the money safe and deprive you men of the sinews of war,” replies Lysistrata. “ What will you do then ? ” asks the old fogy. “ We will manage it,” was the ready answer. “ Will you manage the money ? ” asks the councillor, his amazement evidently on the increase at this unheard-of outbreak of womanly audacity. And to appreciate fully the scene in Aristophanes the reader must understand that Athens, notwithstanding her at that time miraculous enlightenment and thorough modernness on all other subjects, was not in advance of her age in two particulars, namely, in her treatment and estimate of woman and in the matter of slavery. She was almost on a level with Persia even in both these respects. As regards woman she was infinitely behind her Dorian rival, the unintellectual but gallant Sparta, as Müller shows. The Spartan addressed his wife as despoina, or mistress, while the Athenian caged his and regarded the Spartan as henpecked. But of this further along. In the language of Bekker, women were regarded, in the very focus of ancient civilization, as a lower order of beings in comparison with men, both in intellect and heart, incapable of taking part in public affairs, and naturally prone to evil. Bearing these facts in mind, the reader can better appreciate Lysistrata’s audacity and pluck, and the councillor’s astonishment. “ Will you manage the public funds ? ” he asks. “ Why should you think it strange that we women should manage the public funds ? Do we not wholly manage the domestic purse for you, and with judgment and economy ? ” replies Lysistrata interrogatively. “ But the cases are not parallel,” replies the fogy. “ Why not ? ” “ We must have the money to carry on the war.” “ But that is precisely the point,” says Lysistrata. “ There is no occasion for the war at all.” “ What salvation for us is there, except in carrying on the war?” “ We will save you,” replies Lysistrata. “ You ! ” “ Ay, we, to be sure.” At this point the old fogy became bewildered with amazement. ‘‘Be assured you shall be saved even against your will.” “It -were a shame to be thus saved.” “We must save you, my friend,” persists Lysistrata. “ Suppose we don’t want to be so saved ? ” “ For that very reason it is so much the more imperative on us to save you,” replies Lysistrata. “ But how came you to care about war and peace?” asks the councillor, disdainfully. “ We will tell you,” replies Lysistrata. “ Tell me then, quickly,”roars the old dignitary, all the Athenian lord of creation rising in him at this audacious outbreak of the gynœconitis, as the woman’s apartment of an Athenian house was called. “ Tell me quickly,” he roars, “ that you may not get a beating.” Lysistrata, nothing daunted at this ungallant demonstration of the old ass, for he had shaken his fist at her menacingly, coolly requests him to listen and endeavor to keep his hands in their proper place, while she explains her experience as a dutiful Athenian wife, before she left her matronly seclusion, and put on the breeches, as it were, to seek to save her country and get redress for her sex. “ During the war preceding the present one,” she said, “and in former times generally, sheer modesty made us bear with you men, no matter what might be your pranks and capriccios. For we were not allowed even to mutter a complaint. But we kept our eyes on your proceedings, and, to speak frankly, we were by no means pleased with them, although we said nothing to indicate our feelings. Oftentimes in the quiet of our homes, when we heard that you had determined some important matter badly, we would conceal our annoyance under a smile, and ask what has been determined by you to-day in regard to peace. ‘ What ’s that to you?’ used to be the husband’s curt but not courteous reply; ‘will you not hold your tongue now ? ’ And we used to hold our tongues. But once in a while things would get too bad for endurance, and then we used to break silence by asking, ‘ How is it, husband, that you manage these matters with such egregious folly and stupidity?’ But he, looking askance at me, used to tell me to mind my weaving, or I should come to grief. ‘ War,’ he would say oracularly, ' is the business of men.' ” “ Rightly said of your husband, by Jove ! ” breaks in the old fogy at this point. “Wherein was it right, you wretch ? ” rejoins Lysistrata, beginning to warm up herself, “ to spurn our advice when you were mismanaging the government grossly ! Finally when you had brought matters to such a pass that we heard you anxiously inquiring of each other in the streets, ‘ Is there, then, no man in the country equal to the emergency?’ and when we heard it confessed that there was not, we women immediately determined in full assembly to save Greece ourselves. Longer waiting was impossible. Now we want you to keep quiet as we used to and listen to our counsel in your extremity, and we will save you. Do not interrupt me, but hold your peace and card wool, while we women take charge of the war. Erelong we shall be known as the annihilators and dissolvers of war by the Greeks.” “ How will you do it?” inquires the senator. “In the first place,” resumes Lysistrata, “ we will put a stop to your military swashbucklers lounging about the marketplace, buying pea-soup of old women and putting it into their helmets or shaking their shields and javelins at other old fig-selling women to frighten them.” “ But,” says the senator, at last really interested and impatient of minor details, “ how will you be able to put an end to the disturbed affairs of the country?” “Very easily.” “Show us how, then.” “Just as,” says Lysistrata, “ when our thread gets tangled we take it in this way and draw it out with our spindles hither and thither, thus also will we put an end to the war, if you will let us.” “ Do you think,” inquires the senator, at this point, disgusted at the womanly illustration, “ to allay a dreadful state of affairs with your wool and threads and spindles, you silly woman ? ” “ Ay, and if there was any sense in you, yam would administer all your affairs after our fashion of dealing with wool.” “ How so ? ” asks the senator ; “come, explain.” “In the first place,” says Lysistrata, justifying and fully developing her woolly metaphor, “you must wash the state clean of knaves, as fleeces are washed clean of their dirt and freed from briers ; and you must tear asunder those who combine together to get the offices, and pluck their heads off", and then you must card public good-feeling into a basket, and, having taken the wool from every source of supply in the state and its colonial dependencies, collect it into a mass, making a large ball of it, and out of this weave a cloak for the people.” “ Is it not a shame,” exclaims the senator at this point, “ that these women should wind our affairs into a ball, wool-fashion, when they have not any concern in the war at all ? ” “ We no concern in the war, you accursed wretch ! ” replies Lysistrata, her eyes sparkling with indignation ; “ when we bear more than double the load of its miseries that you do ? We, who by our pangs and sorrow furnish the men who are sent off as soldiers to be slaughtered, while we are condemned to lead joyless lives of widowhood and unmarried maidenhood, that is, those of us who are still maidens must pine away and grow old in our lonely chambers.” “ Do not men, then, grow old as well ? ” asks the senator. “ No, by Jove, their case is utterly different. For when they return from the wars, even though gray-headed, they soon marry young girls, while the woman’s time is short, and, if she cannot take advantage of it, no one is willing to marry her, but she sits watching for omens and speculating upon her dwindling chances.” Suffice it to say that Lysistrata and her women, after getting possession of the Acropolis and the fortifications of Athens, held the city strictly closed against the ingress of husbands and lovers returning from the war to see their wives and sweethearts. Now and then there is a weak sister who tries to get out on one pretext and another, but she cannot escape the sharp eye of Lysistrata or deceive her. Men parley for admission outside the walls, but they are inexorably excluded, until all parties to the war, finding that Lysistrata really means business, agree to conclude a peace, the advent of which is joyously celebrated by Athenians and Lacedæmonians with feast and song, and Lysistrata is mistress of the situation.

Twelve years after the close of the Peloponnesian war we find Aristophanes giving another picture of female ascendency in the Athenian state, in a comedy called the Ecclesiazousæ, a word which may be freely rendered the Assembly Women. The general popular Assembly of Athens, which had as unlimited jurisdiction as the British Parliament, was called the Ecclesia, a word which in later times was appropriated by the Christian Church and given a new significance. Every citizen of Athens was a member of the Ecclesia, or Attic Parliament, and was subject to a fine for non-attendance and received a small per diem of two or three obols for attendance ; so that in the Athenian democracy all citizens had a direct voice and vote in legislation, thus literally and truly governing themselves ; whereas in our cumbrous representative system of American democracy, we are governed by a few shrewd politicians, who enjoy a monopoly of all the political power, making all our laws for us, and executing them according to their own pleasure and profit and for their own continuance in power.

In the Assembly Women, Aristophanes represents the wives of Athens, under the leadership of a strong-minded matron by the name of Praxagora, assembling together at a preappointed place in the early morning twilight arrayed in their worse-halves’ clothes, appropriated while their owners were still asleep. They have false beards also, and proceed to rehearse speeches under the critical supervision of Praxagora. The scene is a ludicrous one. But when they feel themselves competent to act as parliamentarians, they steal into the Ecclesia, and by means of a majority of voices thus surreptitiously obtained they decree a new constitution. Among other things it is decreed that age is to be preferred by young wooers before youth and beauty in the selection of wives, until the venerable spinsters are all disposed of, when the pretty girls are to be in order. This comedy is simply a wild play of the Aristophanic fancy, ridiculing the ideal commonwealths of the philosophers. But the curious point is that an old Athenian wit and poet two thousand years ago should have drawn a prophetic sketch of our modern woman’s-rights movement. In the Ecclesiazousæ, gross and untranslatable as it is into modern English, there is one exquisite gem, an ancient Greek serenade in fact. It is called paraclausithura, or the weeping at the door of the beloved object by the young man. “ O dearest, open the door to me and embrace me. For thee I suffer anguish, O golden darling, blossom of love, honey-bee of the Muse, who wearest beauty’s own face, open the door to me and embrace me. For thee I suffer anguish.”

Notwithstanding the long list of surpassingly beautiful and brilliant women who flourished in heroic and historical Hellas and in Hellenized Asia and Egypt, the most influential portion of the Hellenic people, namely, the Ionians, persisted from the beginning in holding woman in low regard, and in recognizing no sentiment in sexual love, but only sensuality. What wonder, then, if their women finally became no better than they were credited with being by their fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers ?

Bekker, in his Charicles, has gathered together all the passages in the Attic poets, orators, and philosophers bearing upon woman and her status in Athens, and it is a mass of opinion in regard to the sex, such as we might expect from a lot of abandoned rakes and debauchees, rather than great poets, sages, moralists, and statesmen. Further along we will cull extracts from this general and elaborate Athenian indictment of womankind. Meanwhile Homer shows hardly a grain of this Ionian contempt for woman, although he was doubtless an Ionian in race as in dialect. To be sure, he has sketched a Circe and a Grecian Lady Macbeth, namely, Clytemnestra, who could plead, however, that her conduct was justified by the lex talionis for the sacrifice of her daughter at Aulis. But the general impression of the heroic women derived from Homer is favorable. Nausicaa is a sweet creature, and Penelope is represented as a true woman and most exemplary housewife. Virgil, the Latin disciple of Homer, had an ascetic taint in his blood, and was, moreover, a shy, rustical fellow, too timid to ingratiate himself with the sex, and so he abused them. But his Dido is his best character, — a noble, high-souled woman, whose only defect was her weakness for that wooden personage, “ pious Æneas.” She was doomed to be guilty of that folly, however, by the higher powers, as Titania was made to caress and fondle the asinine Bottom, But if Homer is catholic and orthodox on the woman question, several later and inferior Greek poets were not. Hesiod, for instance, who was a sort of Poor Richard’s Almanac versifier, and supplied the Greeks with all their mean penny-wisdom, and was known as the Helots’ poet, is naturally enough extremely ungallant towards the sex, as such a low clod-hopper of a bard was sure to be. In his Works and Days, and Theogony both, he represents that Jupiter created woman in a fit of spite against Prometheus, because he had stolen fire from Helios, and thereby taught men the mechanic arts, and so rendered them capable of civilization. “ Forthwith Jupiter wrought evil,” says Hesiod, “for men, in requital for the fire bestowed, and because wily Prometheus had beguiled him.” By the way, the poet does not explain the existence of a womanless community of men prior to the creation of Pandora. " By command of Jove, Vulcan fashioned the image of a modest maiden ; then Jove bade Athene teach the newly created weaving and millinery craft, and

Further, the herald of the gods gifted her with a charming voice, and this woman was called Pandora, because all inhabiting Olympian mansions bestowed upon her a gift, a mischief to men. The poet winds up his account by saying : “ Now aforetime, indeed, the races of men were wont to live on the earth apart and free from ills, and without harsh labor and painful diseases, which have brought death on mortals ; but the Woman, having with her hands removed the great lid from the vessel (wherein ail the ills to which flesh was to be heir had been carefully hived), dispersed them ; then contrived she baneful cares for men.” ³ This is the Aryan account of the creation and début of woman. The Semitic account in Genesis also connects the introduction of sin and death and “all our woe ” with the advent of the better half and lovely complement of man. Archilochus, one of the greatest of the early Greek poets, also lashed the sex severely in his verse, driving one woman to hang herself by his merciless satire. Simonides, who wrote the exquisite little poem descriptive of Danæ and her sleeping boy floating over the stormy sea at midnight, is ranked among the traducers of women. But Euripides, the great Athenian dramatist, was the most conspicuous poetic sinner against the sex among the Grecian writers, although Sophocles, his greater tragic rival, said that he was only a womanhater in his tragedies. In his Hippolytus lie makes his hero exclaim : “ O Jove, wherefore in the name of heaven didst thou place in the light of the sun that specious evil for men, women ? For if thou didst will to propagate the race of mortals, there was no necessity for this to be done by women, but men might, having placed an equivalent in the temples, either in brass, or iron, or the weighty gold, buy a race of children, each for the consideration of the value paid, and thus might dwell in unmolested houses without females.” This Hippolytus was, by the way, a sort of pagan monk and minion of the Moon. Milton, who was a great admirer of Euripides, has a passage in “ Paradise Lost ” in the same spirit with the above extract: —

The truth is, Euripides and Milton both had been unhappy in their domestic relations. Both were muse-rid mopes, abstracted and unsocial. They should have remained bachelors. In the case of Euripides, the sex were amply avenged by the comic poet Aristophanes, who never ceased to ridicule him for his attacks on women.

And, after all, Euripides seems to have had no especial objection to womankind in general, but only to smart, brilliant, or, in modern phrase, strongminded women, — a sort of woman of whom Greece from the beginning was peculiarly productive. “ His state is the easiest,” says the poet, speaking through Hippolytus, “whose wife is settled in his house a cipher, and useless by reason of simplicity. But a wise woman I detest. May there not be in my house, at least, a woman more highly gifted with mind than woman ought to be. For Venus engenders mischief rather among clever women. But a woman who is not endowed with capacity, by reason of her small understanding, is removed from folly.”⁴ Müller makes the remark that women have always been improved by education everywhere except in ancient Greece. There education produced the reverse of improvement. And why did it produce this effect ? Because its subjects were unsexed, as it were, by a malignant public opinion. Intellectual and cultivated women were classified at Athens as hetœrœ. Bekker says such women “were called hetara, or, literally, female companions, who lived a free life, managed their own affairs, and supported themselves by their powers of pleasing. These women were numerous, and were doubtless of every variety of personal character; but the most distinguished and superior among them, such as Aspasia and Theodote, appear to have been the only women in Greece, except the Spartan, who either inspired strong passion or exercised mental ascendency.” So remarkable were Aspasia’s fascinations, her accomplishments, and her powers, not only of conversation, but even of oratory and criticism, that the most distinguished Athenians, Socrates among the number, visited her.⁵ Suffice it to say that this glorious visitor from Ionia, who overawed even the mean popular sentiment of Athens against her sex by her transcendent genius, ruled despotically over the heart and head both of the greatest man of Greece, who found her love and her wisdom priceless boons. His contemporaries might call her hetœra, or by whatever other vile epithet they pleased, she shares and will forever share in the renown of Pericles, which she helped him to win. However much the Athenians might attempt to dwarf their own women by jealously secluding the free, respectable portion of them in the gvnœconitis, and denying them all education and discipline, still Athens always abounded in brilliant women from the Æolian communities, which treated the sex more liberally, and not only allowed them intellectual training, but also the prizes and applause due to genius, and these more than vindicated their sex against the Attic jealousy, and even won the admiration of the Attic public. But it is one of the lasting stigmas of Athens, “ the violet-crowned,” as she loved to be called, that she was utterly unchivalrous towards woman, while her Dorian rival, Sparta, “the spear-crowned,” was exactly and nobly the reverse. The Spartans, as Müller says, were almost the only ancient nation who esteemed the higher attributes of the female mind as capable of cultivation. Let us take the case of Sappho, the Æolian poetess, who flourished in the purer days of Greece, when the Grecian isles sparkled with genius in that red, dewy dayspring of imagination, fancy, and reason, the true era of spontaneity and inspiration, fragments of whose auroral melodies still float on the stream of time, and will float forever, murmurs from the fountain-heads of song and philosophy, in Lesbos and Miletus. The Attic comic poets of the already corrupted age of Pericles could not understand her, and did her memory foul wrong. They could not understand that she poured forth the irrepressible emotions of her heart, as the birds in spring pour forth theirs. For love with Sappho was truly worship. Yet her name has been handed down to posterity as the synonyme of guilty and suicidal passion. And the foul aspersion of the Lesbian love spoken of by Lucian was fabricated to defame her. But there is no doubt about one thing. It is the undissenting and rapturous verdict of antiquity that she was the greatest lyric genius of the pagan fore-world. Such masculine geniuses as Horace, Catullus, and Byron were content to be her humble imitators. Some of their brightest shafts were drawn from the Sapphic quiver. Who like her could hymn the vesper fire of nuptial love, or the sunset hour, which brings all things home that the bright dawn has dispersed, and melts the hearts of wanderers in foreign lands ? She was the mistress of a school of poetesses in Lesbos. Some of her pupils became only less eminent than their peerless mistress. Of the victory of one of these early Grecian poetesses over a mala rival, a living master of song speaks thus. It is the story

Any civilization which degrades women and holds them in little esteem has a dry-rot in it. The brilliant Grecian female who dared to spurn the bars of the gynœconitis and vindicate the intellectual power and genius of her sex, no matter how much glory she might reflect on her race in the eyes of posterity, was regarded at Athens as a tolerated pet for the amusement of festive hours and as of soiled plumage ; and Plato and Aristotle the wise, and Demosthenes the eloquent, could indorse the miserable prejudices of their country by assigning to woman a place far beneath that of man. Aristotle says the male is better by nature than the female. The one is the ruled, the other the ruler. The only virtue, says Bekker, of which woman was thought capable, in the age of Aristotle and Plato, differed but little from that of the faithful slave. She was a minor all her life at Athens. There were no educated women there, except the hetœrœ. Spinning and weaving were the only accomplishments of free maidens and matrons. They saw but little even of their fathers and husbands, who lived abroad more than at home, and even when at home inhabited their own apartments. The gynœconitis, though not exactly a prison, was still the confined abode allotted for life to the female portion of the household. Plato calls women a race accustomed to live in darkness and seclusion. Maidens lived in the strictest privacy till their marriage, under lock and key. They never quitted the shades of the Parthenon, except to be spectators of a festal procession or to swell its pomp. Such occasions were their only chance for love-making. They appeared at the doors only when exciting news came. Old women were more free. Hence they were the go-betweens in love negotiations. The tortoise on which the celestial Venus of Phidias was supported was considered as a symbol of the secluded existence of women. Plutarch says Phidias placed a dragon by the statue of Athene and a tortoise by that of Aphrodite at Elis, in token that virgins needed a guard and that married women should stay at home and keep silent. At Syracuse free women were forbidden to go out at all after sunset. There were womanbeadles at Athens, and even the woman’s market was not frequented by respectable females. There were many religious festivals in which women alone participated, such as that of Ceres, or the Mother. No respectable lady thought of going out without a female slave or attendant. The modesty of Attic maidens was proverbial, while the Spartan virgins were pert and forward. Euripides, in his Andromache, goes so far as to say that a Spartan girl could not be chaste if she wished to be. But this is one of those baseless Athenian libels of the freer and more natural social life of the Dorians and Æolians, which the Athenians could not understand, any more than the prurient and debauched modern Parisians could at first understand the free and frank manners of young American women visiting Paris.

Demosthenes, in his oration entitled Neæra, summed up the woman question and its status in ancient Athens in the passage where he says “ we have hetœrœ for pleasure, pallakœ for attendants, and wives for children and the care of the household.” Celibacy was a penal offence in some of the Grecian states and disgraceful in all. It was regarded as the duty of every citizen to have children as a pledge of fidelity to the state and in order to leave behind worshippers to see that the gods were not neglected and that the state should not lack defenders. Female infants were frequently exposed by fathers to escape giving them dowries at marriage. Divorces were frequent and easily obtained.⁶

But notwithstanding their low estimate of mortal women, the Athenians held their celestial or divine women in especial regard. The tutelar genius of Athens was a female, Our Blue-eyed Lady of Wisdom, Athene Polias. Grote tells us that “ three statues of Athene, all by the hand of Phidias, decorated the Acropolis, — one colossal, forty-seven feet high, of ivory, in the Parthenon ; a second of bronze, called the Lemnian Athene ; a third of colossal magnitude, also in bronze, called Athene Promachos, placed between the Propylæa and Parthenon, and visible afar off, even to the navigator approaching Piræus by sea.” Thus was the visible splendor of Athens, which for ages transcended that of any city of the pre-Christian foreworld, and which excited in the breast of the approaching voyager “ a powerful sentiment of involuntary deference,” surmounted by the shielded and helmeted figure of a stately and gloriously beautiful woman, the beacon welcomed for so many ages by the seeker after knowledge and “ the voyager with the Ionian blast ” as he drew near to the immemorial metropolis of wisdom.

But Attica was not only presided over by a feminine deity, it was also the chief seat of the august worship and mysteries of the Eleusinian Mother and her daughter Proserpine,

These two female deities were in a special manner the genii of life and death and of the means of life. The noblest Grecians and Romans were eager to be initiated into their mysteries. In fact, the chief ancient Aryan divinities, whose worship was most universally significant, were feminine. Their jurisdiction, so to speak, came nighest to the concerns and needs of mortal life. So that if the women of earth were not properly appreciated, the divine women of Olympus were worshipped with a devotion which was equal to the subsequent Christian adoration of the Mater Dolorosa.

B. W. Ball.