Such, then, was the position of women among the early Christians. We have said nothing of Christian legislation, for we have been treating of a period when the legislation was carried on entirely by pagans. But we ought to mention two facts, or two phases of one fact, which had a great effect on the destinies of mankind, but especially of woman, and which have found their way into modern legislation. The Roman father had absolute power of life and of death over his children in the primitive times of Rome. Gradually this power slackened, but he retained to the end of heathendom the right to expose his children, and pagan sentiment supported him in such conduct. The infants, on their birth, might be drowned or exposed to the cold air, or starved, or abandoned to wild beasts. In this way deformed and weakly children were left to perish. A very large number of the children who were thus disposed of were girls. Christianity condemned this practice from the first as murder. It went further. It was a question with the ancients at what time the human fœtus became a living being, and many maintained that the soul came to it only when it was born. Tertullian has discussed this subject fully in his ‘Treatise on the Soul.’[163] He says: “This view [that the fœtus has no soul] is entertained by the Stoics, along with Aenesidemus, and occasionally by Plato himself, when he tells us that the soul, being quite a separate formation, originating elsewhere and externally to the womb, is inhaled when the new-born infant first draws breath.” This was the opinion prevalent among all classes of the Pagan world, and the practice was universal and avowed of killing the fœtus by drugs. But Christianity took the other view, that the soul came at the earliest stage, and maintained that it was equally sinful “to take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth.”[164] Accordingly the heathen practice was forbidden by the Church. The prohibition made its appearance at an early period in Christianity, for it occurs in the Epistle of Barnabas,[165] written about the beginning of the second century, and we are told that Peter says in the Apocalypse (an apocryphal writing probably of early date) “that abortive infants shall share the better fate: that these are committed to a guardian angel, so that, on receiving knowledge, they may obtain the better abode, having had the same experiences which they would have had had they been in the body.”[166] This view of the Christians in regard to infanticide would tend largely to increase the number of women in the world, as infant girls were the most frequent victims of the practice.
The ascetic tendency, on the other hand, repressed the growth of population. It had also a deteriorating effect on posterity. The less spiritual classes of the people, the laymen, being taught that marriage might be licentious, and that it implied an inferior state of sanctity, were rather inclined to neglect matrimony for more loose connexions, and it was these persons alone that then peopled the world. It was the survival of the unfittest. The noble men and women on the other hand, who were dominated by the loftiest aspirations and exhibited the greatest temperance, self-control, and virtue, left no children. During this period there is a striking absence of home life in the history of Christians. No son succeeds his father, no wife comforts the wearied student, no daughter soothes the sorrow of the aged bishop. Perhaps this absence of domestic affection, this deficiency in healthy and vigorous offspring, this homelessness, may account in some degree for the striking features of the next century, and especially the prevalent hardness of heart. Then men disputed with the utmost bitterness and ferocity about minute points of doctrine which are now incomprehensible almost to every one, and matters of absolute indifference to this generation, and they pronounced sentence of eternal damnation without the slightest compunction on all who differed from them. Then treatises were written to show why every heretic should be put to death in this life and tortured eternally in the life to come. And there is scarcely a champion of the faith, orthodox or heterodox, who was not accused of fearful crimes. If a lesson is to be drawn, it surely is that, as with individuals there is no place like home, so with a State there is no institution like home; that a community can be great only where there are happy, harmonious, and virtuous homes, and that homes cannot be happy and harmonious and virtuous unless woman is accorded a worthy place in these homes, with freedom of action, with a consciousness of responsibility, and with the right, unfettered by circumstance or prejudice, to develope all that is best and noblest in her to the utmost perfection.
BOOK IV.
SUPPLEMENTARY.
CHAPTER I.
WOMEN IN THE HOMERIC PERIOD.
(1) THE GENTLENESS OF THE PERIOD.
A remarkable mildness pervades all that Homer says of women. The Greeks were monogamous, but they were so not by law, but from affection, or principle. Homer, accordingly, finds no fault with the polygamy which presents itself in the palace of Priam, King of Troy. “He had fifty sons, nineteen from the same womb, and the rest were borne to him by women in his halls.”[167] Some of these women are spoken of as if they were considered the wives of Priam—Laothoe,[168] for instance, and the beautiful Castianeira,[169] though Hecabe appears as if she were the only wife. But, in fact, there was no clear line drawn between marriage and other associations of men with women in Homeric times. Achilles calls Briseis his wife (ἄλοχος), though she was acquired by the spear.[170] And Ulysses promises that he will give wives to his slaves, Melanthius the goatherd and Eumæus the swineherd.[171] Some have supposed that the words imply that Ulysses would make them free, but there is no hint of this in Homer. The ordinary wife, or what in later times might be called the legal wife, is distinguished by the epithet κουριδίη; but there is no certainty as to the exact meaning of this word.
Homeric society knows nothing of a degraded class of women. There are some instances in which what would be called concubinage occurs, but only twice in the ‘Iliad’ does the word occur (παλλακίς) which was used to designate this in later ages, both times in the same passage.[172] And it occurs once in the ‘Odyssey,’[173] in a passage in which Ulysses invents a tale about himself to prevent recognition. It is evident that the word involved no idea of blame or reproach.
Still more evident is this gentleness in the treatment which the children of these women experienced. When a name is assigned them they are called nothoi (νόθοι), but the name, whatever its meaning might be, had, as Eustathius points out,[174] and the facts show, no depreciatory association. The children whose mothers were not the ordinary wives were still treated as children of the house. When Helen had no hopes of a son, Menelaus had a son born to him from a slave,[175] and he married this son to the daughter of Alector with great festivities. Medesicaste is described as the daughter of Priam nothen (νόθην). She was married to Imbros, a great warrior who lived with Priam, and that king “honoured him equally with his sons.”[176] Pedaios was a nothos to Antenor, “but the divine Theano reared him with great care, like to her dear children, to please her husband.”[177] Agamemnon addresses the Telamonian Teucros thus: “Telamonian Teucros, dear head, ruler of peoples, strike thus if you are to become a light to the Greeks and to your father Telamon, who reared you when you were little, and though you were a nothos (νόθος) took care of you in his own house.”[178] Medon the nothos (νόθος) of Oileus was a leader among the Greeks, and brother of Ajax.[179]
The nothoi most frequently mentioned are those of Priam.[180] All of them occupy high positions as warriors, and one of them is the charioteer of his brother Hector, a position which only the foremost men could occupy. In the ‘Iliad’[181] two sons of Priam are killed, a nothos and a gnesios (son of the acknowledged wife), both in one chariot, the nothos being the charioteer and the gnesios the fighter.