Greek Women

by Mitchell Carroll

When fortune frowns; and should he chance to die,

The last sad rites with honor due she pays."

Surely a touching portraiture of woman's gentle ministry, and worthy to be compared with Scott's famous lines! In spite of the numerous complaints against woman, the plays of the New Comedy usually ended in a happy marriage--the wild youth falls in love with the penniless maiden, reforms, discovers her to be wellborn, and wins over the angry parent; then follow joyous wedding festivities, and happiness ever afterward. Such is the usual course of the plot. Satirical reflections on woman, especially when made in poetry, must not be taken too seriously; and where romantic love is also the theme for song, we may be sure that woman, though much abused, is yet tenderly regarded and highly esteemed among men.

A social movement for the emancipation of woman, which had occupied the attention of thinking men and women of Athens in the latter half of the fifth century before Christ, which had been started by Aspasia in her salon, which had been discussed by Socrates and the Socratics, especially Æschines, and which had brought about a battle royal between the dramatists Euripides and Aristophanes, naturally called for scientific treatment at the hands of the philosophers. The works of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon accordingly devote much space to the consideration of the Woman Question. The female sex, hitherto "accustomed to live cowed and in obscurity,"--as Plato puts it,--justly claimed more favorable conditions; and the philosophers who endeavored to bring about a better social status asserted that woman deserved proper recognition at the hands of men.

Plato had taken seriously to heart the lessons of the Peloponnesian War. He was keenly sensitive to the evils of democracy as then existent, and recognized the need of governmental and social reform. He felt that in the disregard of women at least half the citizen population had been neglected, and we have in his works the strongest assertion of the equality of the sexes.

"And so," he says, in one of his dialogues, "in the administration of a State, neither a woman as a woman nor a man as a man has any special function, but the gifts of nature are equally diffused in both sexes; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, and in all of these woman is only a lesser man." "Very true." "Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none on women?" "That will never do." "One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, another is not." "Very true." "And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, while another is unwarlike and hates gymnastics." "Beyond question." "And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy; one has spirit, and another is without spirit." "This is also true."

From these premises, recognizing the diversity of gifts among women and the correspondence of their talents with those of men, though less in degree, Plato affirms that women should receive a training similar to that accorded to men; to them should be given the same education and assigned the same duties, though the lighter tasks should fall to them as being less strong physically.

"There shall be compulsory education," says Plato, in his Laws, "for females as well as males; they shall both go through the same exercises. I assert, without fear of contradiction, that gymnastic exercises and horsemanship are as suitable to women as to men. I further affirm that nothing can be more absurd than the practice which prevails in our 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."

The view of Plato, as stated in his Republic, which aroused the most hostile criticism was his theory of the community of women as well as of property. But this grew out of the fundamental thesis in his theory of government: that the State must be developed into a perfect unity. The family as a private possession disturbed this unity, and must therefore be dispensed with.

This theory, however, proved too extreme, even for Plato himself, and in his Laws he returns to the idea of marriage, but he follows the Spartan system by putting marriage under the constant surveillance of legislation. He wishes every man to contract that marriage which is most beneficial to the State, not that which is most pleasing to himself. He urges that people of opposing temperaments and of different conditions in life should wed,--the stronger with the weaker, the richer with the poorer,--"perceiving that the city ought to be well mingled, like a cup in which the maddening wine is hot and fiery, but, when chastened by a soberer god, receives a fair associate and becomes an excellent and temperate drink." By such arguments he endeavors to beguile the spirits of men into believing that the equability of their children's disposition is of more importance than equality when they marry.