With us—as with those earlier peoples—the demand for liberty and unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emancipation from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which developments passed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity, licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them, the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes for notoriety. Woman's inherent erraticism—defect of her intrinsic spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation—degenerated, under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling orgies of The Bacchanalia; which were instituted by the sex.
Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men.
Sallust writes thus of a notorious Roman matron:
"Sempronia had committed many crimes of a boldness worthy of a man. Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for decency and modesty."
Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: "The ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the number of their husbands."
Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the sex characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.
The higher Woman-attributes ceased to evolve; ceased to be exercised; ceased to inspire. Women cultivated solely, or pre-eminently, the male-side of their natures; muscle, intellect, ambition, concrete activities, indulgence of sex-instincts. By power of which masculine and alien proclivities, they increasingly dominated the men, in whom the virile traits had proportionally declined. Thus, more and more, the purifying, uplifting and inspiring potence of true Womanhood, together with the softening refinements of The Home, became ever further withdrawn from the national life. Thus corruption undermined; and chaos finally engulfed.
III
Things were different in Ancient Greece.
It has been said that Greece fell because she did not give her women liberty. For a time comes, in the development of every nation, when its women must be freed. Or decadence sets in inevitably. And some of those old civilisations declined, undoubtedly, from lack of progress in this respect.