Plutarch, like most writers who have dealt with the relations of the sexes, fails to observe the fact that just to the extent in the past history of mankind to which women have been free and independent, licentiousness has disappeared, and that just in proportion as the influence of women has declined, in just such proportion have shame, profligacy, disease, and infamy prevailed. To produce a state of society in which the animal instincts ruled supreme, and in which passion was the recognized god, women had first to become physically dependent and mentally enslaved.

For so long a time have women been judged by masculine standards, it is not perhaps remarkable that male writers of these later times can discern in the simplicity and chastity existing among the Dorians, in the age of Lycurgus, no evidence of a former era of female independence. Neither is it singular, as for so many ages women have been subject to the pleasure and control of the opposite sex, that we should be repeatedly told by writers who have dealt with the usages of the Spartans, that their women were “permitted” to do this, and “allowed” to do that, although the facts in the case prove that in all their movements they were guided by their own wills, exercised either directly, or through the oracles of the gods.

When the customs of the ancient Dorians are viewed without prejudice, the fact will doubtless be observed that they originated not in a depraved and licentious state of society, but, on the contrary, that they were the direct result of that freedom of action which characterizes purity of life and a high standard of thought and action.

[CHAPTER IV]
ATHENIAN WOMEN

According to Wilford, the Greeks were the descendants of the Yavanas of India. This writer observes that the Pandits insist that the words Yavana and Yoni are derived from the same root, Yu, and that when the Ionians emigrated they adopted this name to distinguish themselves as adorers of the female, in opposition to a strong sect of male worshippers which had been driven from the mother country.[224] Under the constantly increasing importance of the male, however, both in human affairs and in the god-idea, they subsequently became ashamed of their religious title and sought to abandon it. Of the aversion felt in Greece for this name Herodotus says:

The Athenians and most of the Ionic states over the world went so far in their dislike of the name as actually to lay it aside; and even at the present day the greater number of them seems to me to be ashamed of it.[225]

Whenever in early historic times a country was subjugated, the conquerors either murdered or enslaved the men, and utilized the women for wives, or sexual slaves. The Ionians who, according to Herodotus, sailed from Attica, without women, took for wives native Carians whose fathers they had slain; hence these captives made a law, which they bound themselves by an oath to observe, and which they handed down to their daughters after them, that “none should ever sit at meat with her husband, or call him by his name; because the invaders slew their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and then forced them to become their wives.”[226] The terms of the oaths sworn by them at the time of the capture seem, subsequently, to have been enforced by their imperious masters.

As these women were foreigners they were entitled to little or no respect from their captors. However, as they were to become the mothers of Greek citizens, they must necessarily be “protected,” or, in other words, they must be kept in seclusion. In the time of Solon, rape committed on a free-born woman was punishable by fine.[227]

From that stage in the history of Greek tribes, at which through capture and appropriation of the soil by individuals women began to lose that influence which they had exercised under matriarchal usages, to the time of Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, when they had finally descended to the lowest level of misery and sexual degradation, may be observed a corresponding tendency gradually developing itself among the people towards selfishness, usurpation of power, and the slavery of the masses. In the age of Solon the limit of human wretchedness seems to have been reached, and as the human race is never at a standstill, it must at this time have either become extinct, or have begun gradually to lift itself from the condition of disgrace and ruin into which it had fallen.