The views of Aristoteles are more in keeping with the bourgeois conceptions. According to his “Politics,” every woman should have the right of freely choosing her husband. She should be subservient to him, yet she should have the privilege of giving him good advice. Thucydides expresses a view that meets with the approval of all Philistines. He says: “To that wife is due the highest praise of whom one speaks neither well nor ill outside of her home.”
While such views prevailed women were bound to sink lower and lower in the esteem of men. A fear of excess of population even led men to avoid intimate intercourse with women. An unnatural satisfaction of sexual desires was the result. The Greek states consisted mainly of cities having very limited landed property, and it therefore was impossible to maintain the population at their accustomed nourishment beyond a given number. This fear of excess of population caused Aristotle to advice the men to shun their wives and to indulge in sodomy instead. Before him Socrates had already extolled sodomy as a mark of superior culture. Finally the foremost men of Greece indulged in this unnatural passion. The esteem of woman sank to its lowest level. Bawdy houses containing male prostitutes were maintained, beside those containing female prostitutes. It was in such a social atmosphere that Thucydides could say of woman that she was worse than the sea raging in storm, worse than the fire’s fierce glow and the mountain torrent’s rushing stream. “If it is a god who invented woman, whoever he be, let him know that he is the nefarious originator of the greatest evil.”
While the men of Greece practiced sodomy, the women drifted into the opposite extreme, indulging in the love of their own sex. This was especially the case among the inhabitants of the island of Lesbos, wherefore this aberration was called Lesbian love and is still called so, since it is by no means extinct but continues to exist among us. The chief representative of this “love” was the celebrated poetess Sapho, “the Lesbian nightinggale,” who lived about 600 B. C. Her passion is fervently expressed in her Ode to Venus:
“Thou who rulest all, upon flowers enthroned,
Daughter of Zeus born of foam, o thou artful one,
Hark to my call!
Not in anguish and bitter suffering, O goddess,
Let me perish!—”
Still more passionate is the sensuality expressed in the ode to the beautiful Athis.
While in Athens and other Greek states the patriarchal system prevailed, in Sparta, Athens’ greatest rival, we still find the matriarchate, a condition which had become entirely foreign to most Greeks. Tradition has it that one day a Greek asked a Spartan how the crime of adultery was punished in Sparta; whereupon the Spartan replied: “Stranger, there are no adulterers in our midst.” “But if there should be one?” quoth the stranger. “Then,” said the Spartan mockingly, “his penalty would be to give an ox, so tall that he could stretch his neck across the Taygetus and drink from the Eurotas.” Upon the astonished query of the stranger how an ox could be so tall, the Spartan laughingly replied: “How can there be an adulterer in Sparta?!” The dignified self-consciousness of the Spartan women finds expression in the reply given to a stranger by the wife of Leonidas. The stranger said to her: “You Lacedemonian women are the only ones who rule over men.” To this she replied: “And we are the only women who bring forth men.”
The freedom enjoyed by women during the matriarchate heightened their beauty and increased their pride, their dignity and their self-reliance. There is a uniformity of opinion among ancient writers that these attributes were highly developed in women during the matriarchal period. The condition of servitude that followed naturally had a deteriorating influence. The change is manifested even in the difference of dress that marks the two periods. The dress of the Doric woman hung loosely from her shoulders, leaving her arms and the lower part of her legs uncovered. It is the dress worn by Diana as she is represented in our museums, a free and daring figure. But the Ionic dress covers the figure completely and restrains the motions. The manner in which women dress was and is to this day a proof of their dependence and a cause of their helplessness to a far greater extent than is generally assumed. The style of dress worn by women to this day makes them clumsy and gives them a feeling of weakness that is expressed in their carriage and their character. The Spartan custom of permitting girls to go about naked until maturity—a custom that was made possible by the climate of the country—had the effect, so an ancient writer tells us, of teaching them simplicity of taste and regard for the care of their bodies. According to the views of the time, this custom did not shock the sense of decency or arouse physical passions. The girls also took part in all physical exercises just like the boys. Thus a strong, self-respecting race was reared, conscious of their worth, as is shown in the reply given to the stranger by the wife of Leonidas.
[11] Homer’s “Odyssee.”
[12] Homer’s “Odyssee.”