Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women; but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband. Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle, or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.

But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of his race. He saw plainly—what we might have expected the more scientific Aristotle to see—that woman’s frailer power of reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato as saying that “the female sex is inferior to the male,” and represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only, and not on women, and he presently adds: “The same education which makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same.”[5] There are differences between men and women, but he says that these differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so solid is his conviction of woman’s capacity. In a word, one of the greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed.

What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade both men and women turn from such political life as was left in Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era), held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of woman’s position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of Hypatia—not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria.

In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and, much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman’s position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the spacious tomb of old empires.

Greece had run the normal course that I have traced for the earlier powers. In its pre-civilised stage its men and women seem to have stood on a common level, with the military rulers over all. As it advances from the gloom into the lit territory of history, we find that the men have asserted a crude supremacy in private as well as public life. In this Greece differed from Egypt and Assyria, and a proportionately keener struggle set in. We find many traces of that struggle from the moment when Greece reaches its height of culture; and the intense pre-occupation with moral problems, which begins with Socrates, culminates in the extraordinary feminism of Plato’s Republic. The movement increases as culture rises. But decay has set in, from a variety of causes, and the problems of civilisation are cast on other shoulders. I do not suppose that even the most determined of anti-feminists will venture to connect the decay of Athens with the stirring of its women. The causes have been too often and too clearly traced. The cry of the Athenian feminists dies away because the frame of the superb city is palsied and beset. Another vigorous race fills the stage of the world, and we pass over to Italy for the next phase in the development of woman’s position.

CHAPTER V.
WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROME

The history of woman’s position in ancient Rome is one of the most interesting chapters in the entire story of her development. It affords the most conspicuous illustration of the law we have formulated—that nations generally come into the light of history with their women in subjection, and that the women rebel as conscience and culture prevail over tradition. There was a special reason why the subordination of woman soon fell under discussion at Rome. The culture of Greece had culminated in the establishment of a number of philosophical schools, which speculated on moral problems with complete freedom from the restraints that always hamper such speculation in religious bodies. One of the finest of these schools of morality, the Stoic system, was adopted by cultivated Romans, and eventually by the Emperors, and thus questions of social justice received earnest attention. The position of woman (as well as that of the slave, the child, and the feeble) secured in this way a consideration to which we can only find a parallel in quite recent times. How the promising development was broken off, and women had to wait 1,500 years for a re-consideration of their claims, we shall see presently.

When the first uncertain light of history falls on the promontory of Italy, and on the vigorous nation that was building up one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen, the women are subordinate, but not so harshly treated as at a later date. Letourneau finds a number of indications that the earlier Roman family was maternal in form (i.e., the children took the name of, and inherited through, the mother); but this does not imply anything like a matriarchate. Indeed, a curious marriage-rite that long survived at Rome, in which the husband parted the bride’s hair with the point of a spear, and the story of the rape of the Sabines, suggest an early practice of capturing wives—a practice that leads naturally to subordination.

However that may be, when the Romans come at length within our clear knowledge, the woman is in a position of great subordination. The state-organisation is slight, and the father rules his house with a terrible despotism. From the absolute control of a father a young woman passes to the almost absolute control of her husband. The only difference is that he cannot sell her, as he may the slave or the child, and cannot pass judgment on her except in the presence of her male relatives. It seems, however, that, as Mommsen says, a public opinion had already grown that controlled this theoretic autocracy of the husband and father. The husband could and did dismiss her at his will, while she had no right of divorce; but the woman who was reconciled to the conditions was treated with respect and affection, received guests, went to the circus with her husband, and never suffered the seclusion of her Greek cousin. She could also bear witness or plead, when the courts of justice developed. A few instances of brutal treatment are preserved in the chronicles, but these were quite exceptional.

This first phase of woman’s development in historical Rome lasted until about 200 B.C. I need not dwell on the familiar and splendid types of womanhood that stand out in the chronicles before that time. It is well known that character was finely developed in the early Romans. About the beginning of the second century before Christ, at the close of the long struggle with Carthage, the second phase in the development of the women (and of the race generally) set in. It is to be remembered that the Republic was still a comparatively small power. The great age of conquest, that would carry the eagles over the known earth, was to come long afterwards, and therefore, in the case of Rome, it is sheer historical untruth to represent the power as beginning to decay when the women began to assert themselves. Two hundred years before Christ conservative Romans greeted the woman-movement with all the dismal prophecies with which many greet it in our own time. Yet it was not until three centuries later that Rome reached the height of its power.