Many others will occur to the reader who is familiar with the lighter utterances of the ancients. But in Greece, as in China, India, and Japan, and wherever else men and women have been joined in wedlock, there have been marriages in which husband and wife have lived on terms nobler than those contemplated by the law or demanded by usage. Where could we find a juster view of the duties of husband and wife than in that passage of Xenophon's dialogue on Economy where Ischomachus tells Socrates how he had taken his young wife into his confidence, and come to a clear understanding with her as to the share each should take in carrying on the household? Goethe must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the fine tribute to the dignity of housekeeping in "Wilhelm Meister." Ischomachus had married a girl of fifteen, who came to him as wives in Greece usually came to their husbands—an absolute stranger to him. He had to get acquainted with her after marriage, as, indeed, he says, "When we were well enough acquainted, and were so familiar that we began to converse freely with one another, I asked her why she thought I had taken her for my wife." Much is revealed in that sentence. He tells her that, being married, they are now to have all things in common, and each should only strive to enhance the good of the household. She stares with wonder. Her mother had told her that her fortune would be wholly her husband's, and all that she had to do was to live virtuously and soberly. Ischomachus assents, but he proceeds to show her that, in the nature of things, husband and wife must be equal co-operators, he getting the money, she administering it; he fighting the battle of life out-of-doors, she within the house. At great length this model husband illustrates his point, and entirely in the spirit of the noble passage in Goethe. She catches the idea at length. "It will be of little avail," she says, "my keeping at home unless you send such provisions as are necessary." "True," he replies, "and of very little use my providing would be if there were no one at home to take care of what I send; it would be pouring water into a sieve."
This fine presentation of household economy, like that of the German poet, is, unhappily, only a dialogue of fiction. It was merely Xenophon's conception of the manner in which a philosopher of prodigious wisdom might deal with a girl of fifteen, whom he had married without having enjoyed the pleasure of a previous acquaintance with her. Doubtless there was here and there in ancient Greece a couple who succeeded in approximating Xenophon's ideal.
Among the Romans women began to acquire those legal "rights" to which they owe whatever advance they have ever made toward a just equality with men. It was Roman law that lifted a wife from the condition of a cherished slave to a status something higher than that of daughter. But there was still one fatal defect in her position—her husband could divorce her, but she could not divorce him. Cicero, the flower of Roman culture, put away the wife of his youth after living with her thirty years, and no remonstrance on her part would have availed against his decision. But a Roman wife had rights. She could not be deprived of her property, and the law threw round her and her children a system of safeguards which gave her a position and an influence not unlike those of the "lady of the house" at the present time. Instead of being secluded in a kind of harem, as among the Greeks, she came forward to receive her husband's guests, shared some of their festivities, governed the household, superintended the education of her children, and enjoyed her ample share of the honor which he inherited or won. "Where you are Caius, I am Caia," she modestly said, as she entered for the first time her husband's abode. He was paterfamilias, she materfamilias; and the rooms assigned to her peculiar use were, as with us, the best in the house.
To the Roman law women are infinitely indebted. Among the few hundreds of families who did actually share the civilization of Cicero, the Plinys, and Marcus Aurelius, the position of a Roman matron was one of high dignity and influence, and accordingly the general tone of the best Roman literature toward woman is such as does honor to both sexes. She was even instructed in that literature. In such a family as that of Cicero, the daughter would usually have the same tutors as the son, and the wife of such a man would familiarly use her husband's library. Juvenal, that peerless reviler of women, the Gavarni of poets, deplores the fact:
"But of all plagues the greatest is untold—
The book-learned wife in Greek and Latin bold;
The critic dame who at her table sits,
Homer and Virgil quotes, and weighs their wits,
And pities Dido's agonizing fits.
She has so far the ascendant of the board,
The prating pedant puts not in one word;
The man of law is nonplused in his suit;
Nay, every other female tongue is mute."
"Madame, your cousin Betty wishes to know if you can receive her."
"Impossible! Tell her that to-day I receive."—Les Tribulations de la Vie Élégante, par Girin, Paris, 1870.
The whole of this sixth satire of Juvenal, in which the Gavarnian literature of all nations was anticipated and exhausted, is a tribute to woman's social importance in Rome. No Greek would have considered woman worthy of so elaborate an effort. And as in Athens, Anacreon, the poet of sensual love, was naturally followed by Aristophanes, a satirist of women, so, in Rome, Ovid's "Art of Love" preceded and will forever explain Juvenal's sixth satire. All illustrates the truth that sensualized men necessarily undervalue and laugh at women. In all probability, Juvenal's satire was a caricature as gross and groundless as the pictures of Gavarni. The instinct of the satirist is first to select for treatment the exceptional instance of folly, and then to exaggerate that exceptional instance to the uttermost. Unhappily many readers are only too much inclined to accept this exaggerated exception as if it were a representative fact. There is a passage in Terence in which he expresses the feeling of most men who have been plagued, justly or unjustly, by a woman: