LII. In the conspiracy set on foot by Aristogiton, and which was begun to be executed, by putting to death Hipparchus, the brother of Hippias, a courtesan woman, who had been trusted with the secret, and knew all the accomplices, was put to the torture; but she, to convince the tyrant of the impossibility of extorting the secret from her, cut her tongue asunder with her teeth, and let the end drop before his face.
LIII. When the first indications of the conspiracy of Pison against Nero, began to shew themselves, many of the most illustrious men of Rome shrunk under, and gave way to the rigour of the torture. Lucan, for example, discovered his own mother as an accomplice, and many others their most intimate friends; and there was only one Epicharis, an ordinary and obscure woman, who was acquainted with the whole transaction, on whom neither whips nor fire, nor all the martyrdoms they could invent, had power to tear from her breast the least information.
LIV. I knew a certain one myself, who, being examined by the torture, touching an atrocious crime which had been committed by her master and mistress, resisted the force of that rigorous test, not to save herself, but only to skreen them; for so small a portion of the fault could be imputed to her, either on account of her ignorance of the magnitude of the crime, or from her having acted by the command of others, and from various circumstances of mitigation, that the law would not have condemned her to a punishment, any thing comparable to the severity of that she underwent.
LV. But of women, from whom the power of torture could not tear the secrets of their breasts, the examples are infinite. I heard a person who had been used to assist upon such occasions declare, that, although he had known many of them confess, rather than be stripped naked to prepare them for the execution of the punishment of the rack, the instances of their having confessed after undergoing this martyrdom of their modesty, were very rare. A truly great and shining excellence in the sex this, that the regard for their modesty, should have more weight with them than all the terrors of an executioner.
LVI. I do not doubt, but this parallel I have drawn of the sexes, may appear to many somewhat flattering to the women; but I shall reply to these, that Seneca, whose rigid Stoicism removes all doubts of his impartiality, and whose severity sets him at a great distance from all suspicion of flattery, has made a comparison not a jot less favourable to the side of the women, for he absolutely asserts them to be equal to the men, in all the valuable natural faculties and dispositions. These are his words: Quis autem dicat, naturam malignè cum muliebribus ingeniis egisse, & virtutes illarum in arctum retraxisse? Par illis mihi crede, vigor, par ad honesta (libeat) facultas est. Laborem, doloremque ex æquo si consuevere patiuntur. (in Consol. ad Marciam.)
SECT. IX.
LVII. We are come now to defend the great article of all, which is the question of the understanding; and, I must confess, if my reason does not assist me in arguing this point, that I expect but little help or resource from authorities; because all the authors who have touched upon the matter, with the exception of one or two particular ones only, have wrote so much on the side of the vulgar opinion, that they almost uniformly speak of the understandings of the women with contempt.
LVIII. And truly, I might reply to the authority of the greatest part of these books, with the fable of the lion and the man, inserted by Carducius in one of his dialogues, which is to this effect. A man and a lion travelling together, fell to dispute whether lions or men were the bravest animals: and as they proceeded on their road, they came to a fountain, at the top of which, there was exhibited carved in marble, a man tearing a lion in pieces; upon seeing this, the man turned short on the lion, and in the tone of a conqueror, asked, if he could make any reply to so convincing an argument; to which the lion answered with a smile, this is very pretty reasoning of yours, the carving was designed and executed by a man; we lions are none of us sculptors; if we had, and were capable of doing this sort of work, I will venture to assure you, the representation would have been made quite the reverse to what you there see it.
LIX. The case is, they were men who wrote those books, in which the understandings of the women are held so cheap; had they been written by women, the men would have been placed in the inferior class: and there has not been wanting a woman, who has done something of this sort; for Lucretia Marinella, a learned Venetian lady, among other works composed a book with this title, The Excellences of Women, compared with the Defects and Vices of Men; the sole object of which, was to prove a preference of her own sex to ours. The learned jesuit John of Carthagena says, that he saw and read this book with great pleasure at Rome, and that he saw it also in the royal library at Madrid; but the truth is, that neither she nor we can be judges in this plea, because we are parties to the suit; and therefore the sentence and decision must be confided to the angels, who being of no sex, are impartial.
LX. And in the first place, those who hold the understanding of women in such contempt, as hardly to allow they are endued with more than pure instinct, are unworthy to be admitted as parties in the controversy; neither are those, who maintain, that the greatest reach of a woman’s capacity, does not extend farther than to qualify her for managing a hen-roost.