Woman was to continue to play a fateful part in the history of the usurped power of Pisistratus. The tyrant ill-treated his young wife, and this threw her father, Megacles, again into the party of the opposition. Pisistratus was once more driven from Athens, and this time from Attica as well. But he returned a third time, and established his power so firmly that at his death he bequeathed it to his sons unimpaired. Hippias and Hipparchus ruled wisely at first, and carried on the many public works in which Pisistratus had engaged; but their downfall finally came through an insult to a highborn Athenian maiden, and the story as told by Thucydides shows how highly a sister's honor was cherished at Athens.
Harmodius, an aristocratic young Athenian, had rejected the friendship of Hipparchus, preferring that of Aristogiton, a citizen of modest station. The tyrant basely avenged himself. After summoning a sister of Harmodius to come to take part in a certain procession as bearer of one of the sacred vessels, Hippias and Hipparchus publicly rejected the maiden when she presented herself in her festal dress, asserting that they had not invited her to participate, as she was unworthy of the honor.
Harmodius was very indignant at this insult, and with his friend, who was equally incensed, formed a plot which led to the death of Hipparchus, though Harmodius was also killed in the prosecution of the plan. Aristogiton was put to the torture; and tradition relates that Leæna, his mistress, was also tortured, and fearing lest in her agony she might betray any of the conspirators bit off her tongue. After the expulsion of the Pisistratidæ, the Athenians honored her memory by a bronze statue of a lioness without a tongue, which was set up on the Acropolis. The Athenians by this act showed their delight in a play on names, as Leæna is the Greek word for "lioness."
The Athenian woman has never had the reputation for patriotism that characterized her Spartan sister, yet at times she showed an almost superhuman devotion to the State. After the sack of Athens by Mardonius and his troops in the Persian War, a senator, Lycidas, advised his fellow countrymen to accept the terms which were offered them by the Persian general. The Athenians in scorn stoned to death the man who could suggest such a cowardly deed. And the women, hearing what their husbands had done, passed the word on to one another, and, gathering together, they went of their own accord to the house of Lycidas and inflicted the same punishment on his wife and children--a cruel act, but one showing their love of country and their hatred of treason.
These women, who could be so ruthless when patriotism was involved, knew how to be genuine comforters when their own loved ones were in trouble. The orator Andocides and his companions were tried and imprisoned for impiety in violating the Eleusinian mysteries. "When," says Isocrates, "we had all been bound in the same chamber, and it was night, and the prison had been closed, there came to one his mother, to another his sister, to another his wife and children, and there was woe and lamentation as they wept over their misfortunes."
In so brilliant a race, it was impossible that some women should not rise above the surface and, by extraordinary virtue and by intellectual and spiritual endowments of a high order, win the lasting regard of men.
IX
ASPASIA
The period in Greek history when the intellectual and artistic life of Hellas reached its zenith is known as the Golden Age of Pericles. The lofty ideals of this greatest of Greek statesmen incited him to make Athens the seat of a mighty empire that should spread the noblest and most elevating influences throughout all Hellas. He called to his assistance all the great men of his native city, and made also the fine arts serve as handmaidens of Athens and contribute to her power and splendor. Every condition was present for the realization of an intellectual and artistic epoch such as the world had never witnessed. At the disposal of Pericles was an inexhaustible treasury--the accumulation of the tribute of subject allies. The quarries of Pentelicon offered in great abundance the material necessary for the erection of public buildings which might express in sensuous form the noblest ideals of the Greek race. There were in Athens statesmen, philosophers, artists, dramatists, historians, men preeminent in all departments of the higher life. Foremost among these was Pericles's friend and counsellor, Phidias, a "king in the domain of art, as Pericles was in political life."