Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle

Other Books by F. A. WRIGHT
FEMINISM IN GREEK LITERATURE
FROM HOMER TO ARISTOTLE
BY F. A. WRIGHT
LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD. New York: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1923
Printed in Great Britain by Mackays Ltd., Chatham.
MANIBUS A. W. VERRALL ΤΡΟΦΕΙΑ

There is a question sometimes put to scholars, a doubt often latent in scholars’ minds—How was it that Greek civilisation, with all its high ideals and achievements, fell so easily before what seems at first sight an altogether inferior culture? The difficulty is not solved by a reference to military resources or administrative skill, for moral strength is the only thing that matters in history, and a nation has never yet succeeded merely by pure intellect or by brute force. The fact is—and it is as well to state it plainly—that the Greek world perished from one main cause, a low ideal of womanhood and a degradation of women which found expression both in literature and in social life. The position of women and the position of slaves—for the two classes went together—were the canker-spots which, left unhealed, brought about the decay first of Athens and then of Greece.
For many centuries in Ionia and Athens there was an almost open state of sex-war. At Miletus a woman never sat at table with her husband, for he was the enemy with whom bread must not be broken; at Athens, while all the men went free, women were kept as slaves, and a stranger in the harem might be killed at sight. The sexes were sharply separated: men and women had but few opportunities for mutual esteem and affection, and domestic life—the life of the home, the wife and the children—was poisoned at its source.
The causes and results of this war, far worse than any faction or civil strife, are lamentable enough: its manifestations in ancient literature are perhaps even more important, for it is hard to say how far current opinions of feminine disabilities are not unconsciously due to the long line of writers, Greek and Latin, from Simonides of Amorgos, in the seventh century before Christ, to Juvenal in the second century of our era, who used all their powers of rhetoric and literary skill to disparage and depreciate womankind. In the whole deplorable business men were in the wrong, and they therefore took the aggressive. They applied to women the comforting doctrine of Aristotle, that some people were slaves because they were made by nature to be slaves: women were men’s moral inferiors, and therefore it was men’s duty to keep them down.