What? replied the husband. Why, that for the future she would abjure all meretricious ornaments, and consent to appear decked with that simple grace and beauty which she owed to nature.
At Sparta married persons, as in France, occupied separate beds; but among the Athenians and in other parts of Greece a different custom prevailed. The same remark may be applied to the Heroic Ages. Odysseus and Penelope, Alcinoös and Arete, Paris and Helen, occupy the same chamber and the same couch. The women in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes appealed to this circumstance in justification of their late appearance at the female assembly held before day, and Euphiletos in the oration of Lysias on Eratosthenes’ murder, who admits us freely into the recesses of the harem, confirms this fact, except, that when the mother suckled her own child she usually slept with it in a separate bed. At Byzantium also the same practice prevailed, as we learn from a very amusing anecdote. Python an orator of that city who, like Falstaff, seems to have been somewhere about two yards in the waist, once quelled an insurrection by a jocular allusion to this part of domestic economy. “My dear fellow-citizens,” cried he to the enraged multitude, “you see how fat I am. Well! my wife is still fatter than I, yet when we agree one small bed will contain us both; but, if we once begin to quarrel, the whole house is too little to hold us.”[[101]]
We have seen above how absolute was the authority of women over their household, and this authority likewise extended to their children. The father no doubt could exercise, when he chose, considerable influence; but as most of his time was spent abroad, in business or politics, the chief charge of their early education, the first training of their intellect, the first rooting of their morals and shaping of their principles devolved upon the mother.[[102]] There have been writers, indeed, to whom this has seemed a circumstance to be lamented. But their judgment probably was warped by theory. In the original discipline of the mind, great attainments and experience of the world are less needed than tact to discern, and patience to apply, those minute incentives to action which women discover with a truer sagacity than we do. In this task, ever pleasing to a true mother, the aid of nurses, however, was usually obtained; nor are we, as Cramer observes, on this account to blame the Athenian ladies, so long as they did not, as in after times was too much the fashion, consider their whole duty performed when they had delivered their children to the nurse.
It will be evident from what has been said, that an Athenian lady who conscientiously discharged her duties was very little exposed to ennui. She arose in the morning with the lark, roused her slaves, distributed to all their tasks,[[103]] superintended the operations of the nursery, and, on days frequently recurring, went abroad in the performance of rites specially allotted to her sex. But, one effect of democracy is to confer undue influence upon women.[[104]] And this influence, where by education or otherwise they happen to be luxurious or vain, must infallibly prove pernicious to the state. At Athens, the number of this class of women, extremely limited in the beginning, augmented rapidly during the decline of the republic, and the comic poets substituting a part for the whole, invest their countrywomen generally with the qualities belonging exclusively to these.—But, the success of such writers depending generally on ingenious extravagance and exaggeration, we must be on our guard against their insinuations. Their faith in the existence of virtue, male or female, has, in all ages, if we are to judge by their works, been very lanksided. In their view, if there has been one good woman since the world began, it is as much as there has. Accordingly when these lively caricaturists describe the female demos as addicted extravagantly to wine[[105]] and pawning their wardrobe to purchase it—as compelling the men by their intemperance to keep their cellars under lock and key, and still defeating them by manufacturing false ones—as forming illicit connexions, and having recourse to the boldest stratagems in furtherance of their intrigues, we must necessarily suppose them to have amused themselves at the expense of truth; though that, among the Athenians, there were examples enough of women of whom all this might be said, it would be absurd to deny.
We know that where the minds of married dames are fixed chiefly upon dress and show their anxiety has often very little reference to their husbands. And if it be their object to excite admiration out of doors, it is simply as a means to an end, which end, in too many cases, is intrigue. Proofs exist that among the Athenian ladies there were numbers whose idle lives and luxurious habits produced their natural results—loose principles and dissolute manners. The beauty of Alcibiades drew them after him in crowds,[[106]] though we do not read that, like another very handsome personage in a modern republic, the son of Cleinias found it necessary to carry about a club to defend himself from their importunities. They went abroad elaborately habited and adorned merely to attract the gaze of men,[[107]] and having thus sown the first seeds of intrigue, they took care to cultivate and bring them to maturity. The felicitous invention of Falstaff’s friends, which got him safe out of Ford’s house in a buck-basket, was not so new as Shakspeare, perhaps, imagined. His predecessors on the Athenian stage had already discovered stratagems equally happy among their countrywomen, whose lovers we find made their way into the harem wrapped up in straw, like carp—or crept through holes made purposely by fair hands in the eaves—or scaled the envious walls by the help of those vulgar contrivances called ladders.[[108]]
The laws of Athens, however, were more modest than its women. For, from the very interference of the laws, it is evident, that the example of the Spartan ladies, who enjoyed the privilege of exposing themselves indecently, found numerous imitators among the female democracy. To repress this unbecoming taste, it was enacted, that any woman detected in the streets in indecorous deshabille[[109]] should be fined a thousand drachmæ, and, to add disgrace to pecuniary considerations, the name of the offender, with the amount of the fine, was inscribed on a tablet and suspended on a certain platane tree in the Cerameicos. However, what constituted indecorous deshabille in the opinion of Philippides, who procured the enactment of the law, it might be difficult to determine. Possibly it may have consisted in the too great exposure of the bosom, for the covering of which ladies in remoter ages appear to have depended very much on their veils. Thus in the interview of Helen with Aphrodite she saw, says the poet, her beautiful neck, desire-inflaming bosom, and eyes bright with liquid splendour. Her garments concealed the rest.[[110]] Now, as it was customary for ladies to appear veiled in public, the object of the law of Philippides may simply have been to enforce the observance of this ancient practice. The magistrates who presided over this very delicate part of Athenian police were denominated “Regulators of the women,”[[111]] an office which Sultan Mahmood in our day took upon himself. They were chosen by the twenty from among the wealthiest and most virtuous of the citizens, and in their office resembled the Roman Censors and similar magistrates in several other states.[[112]]
The evil influence of women of this description,[[113]] who, as Milton expresses it, would fain at any rate ride in their coach and six, was perceived and lamented by the philosophers. To their vain and frivolous notions might be traced, in part at least, the love of power, of trifling distinctions, of unmanly pleasures, which infected the Athenians towards the decline of their republic. By them the springs of education were poisoned, and the seeds sown of those inordinate artificial desires which convulse and overthrow states. In vain did philosophers inculcate temperance and moderation, while the youth were imbued with different opinions by their mothers. The lessons of the Academy were overgrown and checked in the harem. Such dames no doubt would grieve to find their husbands content with little[[114]] (as was the case with Xantippe) and not numbered with the rulers, since their consequence among their own sex was thus lessened. They would have had them keen worshipers of Mammon, eagerly squabbling and wrangling in the law-courts or the ecclesiæ, not cultivators of domestic habits or philosophical tranquillity and content: and in conversing with their sons would be careful to recommend maxims the reverse of the father’s, with all the cant familiar to women of their character.[[115]]
Our review of female society at Athens would be incomplete were we to overlook the Hetairæ who exerted so powerful an influence over the morals and destinies of the state. They occupied much the same position which the same class of females still do in modern communities, cultivated in mind, polished and elegant in manners, but scarcely deserving as a body to be viewed in the light in which a very distinguished historian has placed them.[[116]] Their position, however, was anomalous, resembling rather that of kings’ mistresses in modern times, whose vices are tolerated on account of their rank, than that of plebeian sinners whose deficiencies in birth and fortune exclude them from good society. There is much difficulty in rightly apprehending the notions of the ancients on the subject of these women. At first sight we are shocked to find that, during one festival, they were permitted to enter the temples in company with modest ladies. But in what Christian country are they excluded from church?[[117]] Again, behold in our theatres the matron and the courtezan in the same box, while at Athens even foreign women were not suffered to approach the space set apart for the female citizens. Nevertheless, though on this point so rigid, they were in their own houses permitted occasionally to visit them[[118]] and receive instructions from their lips, as in Turkish harems ladies do from the Almè.
It is not permitted here to lift the curtain from the manners of these ladies. But their position, pregnant with evil to the state through its contaminating influences on the minds of youth, must be comprehensively explained before a correct idea can be formed of the internal structure of the Athenian commonwealth, of the germs of dissolution which it concealed within its own bosom, or the premature blight which an unspiritual system of morals was mainly instrumental in producing. No doubt the question whether the existence of such a class of persons should be tolerated at all, is environed by difficulties almost insurmountable. They have always existed and therefore, perhaps, it is allowable to infer that they always will exist; but this does not seem to justify Solon for sanctioning, by legislative enactments, a modification of moral turpitude debasing to the individual, and consequently detrimental to the state. To do evil that good may come, is as much a solecism in politics as in ethics. On this point I miss the habitual wisdom of the Athenian legislator. Lycurgus himself could have enacted nothing more at variance with just principles, or more subversive of heroic sentiments.
The Hetairæ,[[119]] recognised by law and scarcely proscribed by public opinion, may be said to have constituted a sort of monarchical leaven in the very heart of the republic; they shared with the sophists, whom I have already depicted, the affections of the lax ambitious youths, panting at once for pleasure and distinction, fostered expensive tastes and luxurious habits, increased consequently their aptitude to indulge in peculation, shared with the unprincipled the spoils of the state, and vigorously paved the way for the battle of Chæronea. But if their existence was hurtful to the community, so was it often full of bitterness to themselves. In youth, no doubt, when beauty breathed its spell around them, they were puffed up and intoxicated with the incense of flattery[[120]]—their conversation at once sprightly and learned seemed full of charms—their houses spacious as palaces and splendidly adorned were the resort of the gay, the witty, the powerful, nay, even of the wise—for Socrates did not disdain to converse with Theodota or to imbibe the maxims of eloquence from Aspasia. But when old age came on, what were they? It then appeared, that the lively repartees and grotesque extravagancies which had pleased when proceeding from beautiful lips, seemed vapid and poor from an old woman. The wrinkles which deformed their features were equally fatal to their wisdom that flitted from their dwellings, and became domiciliated with the last beautiful importation from Ionia. Thus deserted, the most celebrated Hetairæ became a butt for the satire even of the most clownish. The wit wont to set the table in a roar scarcely served to defend them against the jests of the agora.