Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

Perhaps Antigone is a trifle too coldly perfect, too faultlessly wise—a tacit reflection upon every-day human nature, that likes its ease, and counts the cost of its renunciations. We look for a trace of weakness, a warm burst of living tenderness. But duty is shy like love, and chary of expression. “I do not love a friend who loves in words,” is the cry of her steadfast soul. There she stands, in the still majesty of a sorrow that lies too deep for tears, supreme among the classic types of the world as a model of filial devotion. Cordelia, true and loyal as she is, and tender at heart, does not approach her in strength and dignity. But the duty of the Greek heroine does not end with her father’s death. She lays down her life at last that the false-hearted brother, who has given her no gentle consideration in her days of helplessness and despair, may not lie unburied on the plains of Thebes, and so wander without rest in Hades. She laments the lost pleasures of living. No husband or children are to be hers. Yet no enthusiasm of passion or romance tempers this “cold statue’s fine-wrought grace.” The man she was to marry is secondary. Love, in our sense, does not enter as a motive power into her life, but her human need of sympathy is shown in a few pathetic words:

And yet, of all my friends,
Not one bewails my fate;
No kindly tear is shed.

There are a few women of colossal wickedness who serve as foils, or shadows in the picture. Their very sins are a part of the overmastering strength that defies its hard limitations. “Of all things, as many as have life and intellect, we women are the most wretched race; we must first purchase a husband with excess of money, then receive him as our lord,” is the bitter protest of the wronged Medea, and the key-note to her tragical destiny. Clytemnestra says that she has always been trained to obey, but she towers far above her warrior husband in force as in crime. She resents his unfaithfulness; she does not forgive him for the inhuman sacrifice of their innocent daughter; she meets him on his own ground. It is appalling, the stern and pitiless passion with which her untamed spirit, spurred on by the white-hot hate which is often a great love reversed, tramples upon every human impulse, and sweeps a whole race with her to destruction. The clash of elemental forces is there, even though the responsibility is shifted upon the gods, who use these frail mortals as blind instruments in their inscrutable plans.

But these monsters of crime are few, and seem to throw into stronger relief the self-forgetful women who exalt their inferior position, and bend their heads to the yoke with such stately dignity that they seem to command even in obeying. For, in spite of the important part assigned them in the world of affairs as well as at the fireside, they are constantly reminded of their little worth. “Let not women counsel,” is the advice of men to the wisest of them.

Woman, know
That silence is a woman’s noblest part,

says the ill-tempered Ajax to his amiable wife. This gentle Tecmessa wishes to die with him, for “Why should I wish to live if you are dead?” He only tells her to mind her own affairs and be silent. Telemachus orders his faithful mother not to meddle with men’s business, but it was precisely because she did meddle with it, and tried, by various simple arts, to bring order into the chaos men had raised, that his royal father had any home to return to, or any kingdom to leave to his ungracious son.

IV

So far as we can gather from Homer, women of the better sort had a degree of consideration in the heroic age which they lost at a later period. When men fought or tilled the soil, it was in the natural order of things that they should stay at home to look after their children and households. The division of duties was fair enough. In a reign of brute force they needed protection, and though it was pretty well settled that men were born to rule and women to be ruled, there was evidently a great deal of pleasant companionship in family life. Compared with the seclusion of the Oriental harem, the position of these women was one of freedom, and it lasted to historic times. Their supreme distinction was a moral one. Books they had not. Of literature nothing was known beyond the verses and tales of wandering minstrels. Art was little more than a handicraft. If men worked in marble or in metal, women designed patterns for weaving and embroidery. Men had not begun to put their thoughts or speculations into enduring form, and women were not excluded from a large part of their lives. But so perfectly did many of them realize the world’s ideal of feminine virtues that we ask no more. They stand upon pedestals, like the masterpieces of Greek sculpture, noble in their simplicity and lovely in the repose of their surpassing strength.

But the dramatists reflected in a thousand ways the altered spirit of an age in which good women had no visible part. Their immortal heroines are equally strong and instinct with vitality, though less simple and of severer mold, but they are revered from afar as the goddesses were, while real women are a target for abuse and ridicule. It is to no rare and perishable beauty, no fleeting grace, no intellectual brilliancy, that they owe their eternal charm, but to their moral greatness, their strength of sacrifice. These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse destiny or of their own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. She was made to be loved, to command; all others were made to serve. The Greeks adored beauty; they lived in it, they created it. Here lay their pride; here more than once they found their Nemesis. But virtue they gave a place apart, as they did the wise Athena, who towered in golden isolation over the Attic divinities. It had no share in the joy of existence.

Beneath the glad pæans of heroes we hear at intervals, across the ages, the clear voices of women chanting a miserere in an undertone of sorrow or despair. Doubtless the poets saw and felt the tragical side of their lives, but tradition had the inevitability of fate, as it has had in other times. They have given us great and lonely ideals of womanhood, but a somber picture of the place held by living women in the Athenian world.