But, notwithstanding the beneficent influence which Aspasia ever exerted on those about her, notwithstanding the heroic efforts she had made to liberate her own sex from the restrictions that had so long harassed and degraded it, the wives and daughters of the citizens of Athens were still kept in almost absolute seclusion and denied the opportunities of mental culture which were so generously accorded the free-born hetæræ from Asia Minor and the islands of the Ægean. Socrates, as we learn from Xenophon, asserted woman's equality with man, while Plato taught that mentally there was no essential difference between man and woman. He concluded, accordingly, that women of talent should have the same educational advantages as men. In The Republic as well as in the Laws, when he refers to education—which he would make compulsory for "all and sundry, as far as possible"—his views are far in advance of those which have been entertained until the last half century. He would have girls as well as boys thoroughly instructed in music and gymnastic—"music for the mind and gymnastic for the body."[12]
In the Laws he contends that "women ought to share, as far as possible, in education and in other ways with men. For consider:—if women do not share in their whole life with men, then they must have some other order of life."
Again he asserts "Nothing can be more absurd than the practice which prevails in our own country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strength and with one mind, for thus the state, instead of being a whole, is reduced to a half."[13]
In The Republic he expresses the same idea when he affirms that "the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both"—men and women—"all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women."[14]
These opinions of Socrates and Plato are so at variance with those of their contemporaries, and so contrary to the custom that then obtained of excluding all but free-born hetæræ from the advantages of education and culture, that we cannot but think that they were due to the profound influence which had been exercised directly or indirectly by Aspasia on both of these great philosophers. Be this as it may, neither the efforts of Aspasia nor the teachings of Socrates and Plato were able to remove the bars to intellectual development from which the women of Greece had so long suffered. A change in customs and laws concerning the rigid, oriental seclusion of women did not come until much later, and then it was under a new régime—that of the Cæsars—while complete equality of men and women in school and college was not recognized until long centuries afterward.
It is interesting to speculate regarding what Greece would have become had she developed her women as she developed her men. Never in the history of the world were there in any one city so many eminent men—poets, orators, statesmen, painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers—as in Athens, and yet not a single native-born Athenian woman ever attained the least distinction in any department of art or science or literature. We cannot conceive for a moment that Greece's fertility in great men and barrenness in great women was due to the fact that the mothers of such illustrious men were ordinary housewives and entirely devoid of the talent and genius which gave immortality to their distinguished sons. The careers of Aspasia and the achievements of Sappho, Corinna, Myrtides, Erinna, Praxilla, Telesilla, Myrus, Anytæ and Nossidis, Theano and her daughter, to mention no others, absolutely preclude such an assumption.
The women in Greece, there can be no doubt about it, were as richly endowed by nature as were the men, and only lacked the opportunities that men enjoyed to achieve, in every sphere of intellectual activity, a corresponding measure of success. They were extraordinary types, these women of ancient Greece; for among them we find the dignified Roman matron, the chatelaine of the Middle Ages, the brilliant woman of the Renaissance and the cultured mistress of the French salon. But all their talent, power and genius counted for naught.
Had the civilization of Greece been a woman's civilization, as well as a man's civilization, had there been a federation of all the Greek states, as Aspasia seems to have striven for, instead of a number of small and independent city-states; had the women of Hellas been allowed the same liberty of action in intellectual work as was granted to the Italian women during and after the revival of letters, and had they been encouraged to develop all their latent powers that were so systematically suppressed, and to work in unison with the men for the welfare and advancement of a united nation, it is difficult to imagine what a dazzling intellectual zenith a supremely gifted people, "full summ'd in all their powers," would have attained. Their capacity for work and for achieving great things would have been doubled and their power as a political organization would have been practically irresistible.
"We are the only women that bring forth men," said Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas. The Spartan mothers, who had more of liberty than their Athenian sisters, did, indeed, bring forth warriors of undying renown; but it was the mothers of Athens who, notwithstanding all their grievous disabilities, gave to the world all the greatest masters in art, literature, and philosophy—the men who through the ages have been the leaders and the teachers of humanity, and who seem destined to hold their exalted position until the end of time.
The failure of the men of Greece to avail themselves of the immense potential power, which they always kept latent in their women, was the occasion of a terrible nemesis in the end. For this failure, coupled with the frightful license introduced by a class of educated women, like the hetæræ, without legal status or domestic ties, and the wave of corruption that subsequently followed the advent of the countless dissolute women who flocked to the Hellenic cities from every part of the East, paved the way for the nation's downfall and for its ultimate conquest by the resistless Roman legions that swept the once glorious but ill-fated country of Pericles and Aspasia.