It was not wonderful that it should be so.
Shakspeare, however, was not content to let Portia rest her plea for confidence on the essential nature of the marriage bond:
"I grant I am a woman; but withal,
A woman that lord Brutus took to wife.
I grant I am a woman; but withal,
A woman well reputed—Cato's daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so fathered and so husbanded?"
And afterward in the very scene where Brutus is suffering under that "insupportable and touching loss," the death of his wife, Cassius pleads—
"Have you not love enough to bear with me,
When that rash humor which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?
Brutus.—Yes, Cassius, and henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He'll think your mother chides, and leaves you so."
As indeed it was a frequent belief among the ancients, as with our Indians, that the body was inherited from the mother, the soul from the father. As in that noble passage of Ovid, already quoted, where Jupiter, as his divine synod are looking down on the funeral pyre of Hercules, thus triumphs—
"Neo nisi materna Vulcanum parte potentem,
Sentiet. Aeternum est, à me quod traxit, et expers
Atque immune neois, nullaque domabile flamma
Idque ego defunctum terrà coelestibus oris
Accipiam, cunctisque meum laetabile factum
Dis fore confido.
"The part alone of gross maternal flame
Fire shall devour; while that from me he drew
Shall live immortal and its force renew;
That, when he's dead, I'll raise to realms above;
Let all the powers the righteous act approve."
It is indeed a god speaking of his union with an earthly Woman, but it expresses the common Roman thought as to marriage,—the same which permitted a man to lend his wife to a friend, as if she were a chattel
"She dwelt but in the suburbs of his good pleasure."
Yet the same city, as I have said, leaned on the worship of Vesta, the Preserver, and in later times was devoted to that of Isis. In Sparta, thought, in this respect as in all others, was expressed in the characters of real life, and the women of Sparta were as much Spartans as the men. The "citoyen, citoyenne" of France was here actualized. Was not the calm equality they enjoyed as honorable as the devotion of chivalry? They intelligently shared the ideal life of their nation.