But the Doric women had to some extent the tastes of the Æolians, and were as a rule far better educated than their husbands. We hear of clubs or associations of women for the cultivation of the mind, and for teaching girls after the fashion of the time. In music they excelled. Aristophanes introduces in “Lysistrata” choruses of Spartan and Athenian maidens who sing in friendly rivalry. Many of the parthenia, or processional hymns, were written by foreign poets for these young girls, whose spiritual aspirations found vent in that way. They did not give voice to personal emotions, but to great religious or patriotic enthusiasms.
Whatever education may have been given to women, it is not likely that their intellectual standards were very broad or very high; at least, we have no visible evidence of it, as we find no living trace of their talents for some centuries after the brief poetic flowering that followed Sappho, and even then not in Sparta. It was among the Dorians of a later time, and mainly in the colonies, that the feminine taste for literature revived, but it took a didactic or philosophical form, and they wrote in prose.
The talent of the Spartan women was largely executive, and they were noted for judgment, as well as for heroism. As nurses they were in great demand in other parts of Greece. A strong proof of their gifts of administration is found in the fact that they had equal rights of inheritance with men, and came in time to own two fifths of the land and a large share of the personal property. This gave them a dignity and influence not accorded to their sex elsewhere. Aristotle did not like their freedom and power. He claimed that they ruled their husbands too imperiously; also, that they were liable to be troublesome in times of war, as it was impossible to bring them under military discipline. If they ruled the rulers, he thought that the results would be the same as if they ruled in their own right. Plutarch tells us that “the Spartans listened to their wives, and women were permitted to meddle more with public business than men with the domestic.” Again he says that “women considered themselves absolute mistresses in their houses; indeed, they wanted a share in affairs of State, and delivered their opinions with great freedom concerning the most weighty matters.” But freedom is relative, and a little of it goes a great way where there has been, as a rule, none at all. It does not seem that any fears on this subject were realized, as their influence, so far as we know, was conservative, and they were subordinate in theory if not always in fact. “When I was a girl I was taught to obey my father, and I obeyed him,” said a woman, when asked to do something of doubtful propriety; “and when I became a wife I obeyed my husband; if you have anything just to urge, make it known to him first.” A clever if not very chivalrous writer of the time says: “It becomes a man to talk much, and a woman to rejoice in all she hears”—a comfortable arrangement for dull husbands, who would be sure at least of an appreciative audience at home.
But we find instances of heroic devotion among these hardy women, for which we look in vain among the ignorant and secluded wives of Athens. It is a pity that Plutarch did not give some of them a distinct place in his gallery of celebrities. He had a superior wife himself, a well-bred woman of dignity, tenderness, great mental vigor, simple taste, and distinguished virtues, who was above the vanities of her time, and bore sorrow like a philosopher. He loved her devotedly, praised her fortitude, and admired her strength. This perhaps accounts for the fact that he was kindly disposed toward women in general, and thought that their fame should be known, since love of glory was not confined to one sex. But if he did not set them on a pinnacle of their own, he has shown us by various anecdotes that they could counsel like seers and die like heroes. In the decline of Sparta, when Agis planned to restore the old simplicity it had lost with the coming of luxury and foreign ways, he asked the aid of his mother, the brave Agesistrata, a woman of great wealth and influence. She thought the division of property he proposed neither wise nor practicable, and advised him against it. But when she found his heart set upon it as a means of winning glory, as well as bringing back the people to virtue and simpler manners, she consented not only to give up her own great fortune, but to induce others to join her. As the wealth of Sparta was largely in the hands of women who were less disinterested and did not care to lose either their luxuries or their power, this socialistic movement failed, and its self-sacrificing leaders were put to death. When Agesistrata was led into the prison to see her son, he lay strangled before her. She tenderly placed her own dead mother by his side, and baring her neck with calm dignity, said: “May this prove for the good of Sparta.”
In the second attempt to restore the prestige of the falling State, Cratesiclea rivals the great heroines of the dramatists in her noble self-surrender. Ptolemy demanded, as the price of his alliance, that Cleomenes should send his mother and son to Egypt as hostages. When she heard of it she smilingly said: “Was this the thing you have so long hesitated to tell me? Send this body of mine at once where it will be of the most use to Sparta, before age renders it good for nothing.” She went without tears, saying that no one must see them weep. Finding afterward that the king was hampered by the fear that some ill might befall them, she sent him word to do what was best, and never mind what became of an old woman and a little child. This enterprise, too, was a futile one, but the women who had inspired men with their own courage and devotion died as bravely as they had lived. It is a touching scene where the young and beautiful wife of Panteus pays the last offices to her dead friends, then, folding her robe modestly about her, tranquilly tells the executioner to do his work.
“In women too there lives the strength of battle,” says Sophocles, and nowhere could he have found such heroic examples as among the rugged hills of Sparta. Out of such material, Antigones and Iphigenias are created.
Beneath a discipline of the affections so severe that it seems as if they must have been crushed altogether, we sometimes fall upon unsuspected depths of tenderness. Chelonis left her husband in his day of power, to care for her father, who had been deposed and was in disgrace and need. When the political tables were turned, and her father was again on the throne, she pleaded with eloquence and tears for her husband’s life. Her wise and tactful words saved him, but he was exiled. She was urged by her family to stay and enjoy the fruits of their victory, but, turning sorrowfully away, she took her children, kissed the altar where they had found a sanctuary, and went out with her disgraced husband to poverty and obscurity.
We cannot measure these Spartan women by the standards of to-day. They did not belong to the age of university courses, society functions, and Christian ideals. Love as we understand it played a small part in their lives, and of romance there is little trace, though examples of conjugal affection are not rare. Of what we call learning they probably had very little, and of esthetic taste still less, but of clear judgment, solid character, and fearless courage, they had a great deal. They were trained as companions and helpers of men, not as their toys, though they were always subject to them. It was a simple life they led—a life with few graces and few of our complexities. They were the Puritans of the classic world, without the Puritan conscience or moral sense, but with more than Puritan courage and fortitude.