Here Plato seems to hit the truth. If there is one quality—call it virtue or vice, as you will—which is peculiarly a woman’s and not a man’s characteristic, it is secretiveness. The result of many centuries of self-suppression, it gives a certain aggravating charm to the female mind, and usually does no particular harm. But it is, perhaps, the chief reason of women’s comparative failure in literature. Sincerity in writing is the saving grace, and if a book is not frank, it should never be written. Few women authors resemble Sappho, or Jane Austen, or Mme. Colette in contemporary French literature, who, unlike though they are in the circumstances of their lives, do all make a serious attempt at truth. Most women fail in frankness towards themselves and their readers. George Eliot, Ouida, George Sand (to take another typical and strongly differentiated trio) dissemble their facts as much as they dissemble their names. Like ostriches, they hide their faces under a cloud of words.
XII.—The Attic Orators
To turn from Plato’s ideal State to the actual condition of woman’s life during the fourth century in Athens, as we have it revealed in the pages of the orators, is like passing from a breezy hillside into a dark, close-shut room. We see the working of the harem system, with all its atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion. The women are closely watched; for it is presumed that they will be unfaithful to their husbands if they can: they live secluded in the women’s quarter of the house—the gynæconitis—and for any strange man to enter their rooms is a grave impropriety. In Demosthenes, for example, we find it imputed to Androtion, as a proof of unbearable insolence, that in his capacity of tax-collector he forced his way into the women’s apartments, and compelled the master of the house to hide under the bed, putting him thus to shame before his womankind. That a wife should appear publicly with her husband at a dinner party, and take a share in men’s pleasures, is equally an offence against morality. Neæra was known to have sat at dinner with her husband and his friends, and this fact, testified by witnesses, is taken as an obvious proof that she was a woman of abandoned character. The sister of Nicodemus, Isæus argues, could not have been legally married, for she was often seen at entertainments with the man she called her husband, and ‘wedded wives do not go out to dinner with their husbands, or expect to join in festivities.’
The doctrine that a wife is her husband’s property is applied to the fullest extent, and any offence against that property is punished with the utmost rigour of the law. A husband who finds another man in his harem is allowed to put him to death. At Athens there is no pretence of ‘the sanctity of marriage’: the offence and the punishment is the same whether the intrigue is with the master’s wife or with his concubine: each is equally the master’s property, to be protected at any cost. It is a more heinous crime to make love to a woman who belongs to another man than to offer her violence; for the offence is viewed solely from the owner’s side, and a woman who willingly yields to another is outraging her lawful master’s amour propre more deeply than if she were taken by force. The lover is put to death; the ravisher pays a fine: the point of view being much the same as used to hold in English law, where the wife-beater was regarded as a less offensive character than the poacher.
But if the husband of an erring wife had the support of the law, however violent his methods of revenge, the case was very different when the woman was the offended party. There is an anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades which reveals the attitude of the Athenian lawgivers.
Hipparete made a prudent and affectionate wife;—but at last growing very uneasy at her husband’s associating with such a number of courtesans, both strangers and Athenians, she quitted his house and went to her brother’s. Alcibiades went on with his debaucheries, and gave himself no pain about his wife; but it was necessary for her, in order to obtain a legal separation, to give in a bill of divorce to the archon, and to appear personally with it; for the sending of it by another hand would not do. When she came to do this according to law, Alcibiades rushed in, caught her in his arms, and carried her through the market-place to his own house, no one presuming to oppose him, or to take her from him. From that time she remained with him until her death, which happened not long after, when Alcibiades was upon his voyage to Ephesus. Nor does the violence used in this case seem to be contrary to the laws either of society in general or of that republic in particular. For the law of Athens, in requiring her who wants to be divorced to appear publicly in person, probably intended to give the husband an opportunity to meet with her and to recover her.—Plutarch, ‘Alcibiades,’ Langhorne’s Translation.
A wife seeking to escape from an unworthy husband, we see, is regarded in the same light as a slave seeking to escape from his owner, and all the resources of the law are put at the disposal of the husband and the master. There was a constant tendency to think of women and slaves together; and the institution of slavery was certainly one of the most powerful agents in the degradation of women at Athens. A slave-girl was, in the eye of the law, a thing—not a human being, and she was free from all restraints of moral sanction. She was the property of her owner, and her only duty was to obey him in all things: virtue, chastity, modesty, were for her things impossible of attainment; and over the whole business was cast the protection and encouragement of the law. There came into existence a class of women condemned to physical and moral degradation—a class whose very existence was an insult to womankind; so that Aristophanes, at least, has the wit to see that the establishment of a female government would have as one of its first results the forcible abolition of all such recognised and legal forms of vice.