throw some light on the contemporary attitude toward women and the
different kinds of domestic attachment--the _Ajax_, the _Trachiniae_
and _Antigone_. When Ajax, having disgraced himself by slaughtering a
flock of sheep and cattle in the mad delusion that they were his
enemies, wishes he might die, Tecmessa, his concubine, declares, "Then
pray for my death, too, for why should I live if you are dead?" She
has, however, plenty of egotistic reasons for dreading his death, for
she knows that her fate will be slavery. Moreover, instead of being
edified by her expression of attachment, we are repelled when we bear
in mind that Ajax slew her father when he made her his concubine. The
Greeks were too indelicate in their ideas about concubines to be
disturbed by such a reflection. Nor were they affected disagreeably by
the utter indifference toward his concubine which Ajax displays. He
tells her to attend to her own affairs and remember that silence is a
woman's greatest charm, and before committing suicide he utters a
monologue in which he says farewell to his parents and to his country,
but has no last message for Tecmessa. She was only a woman, forsooth.

Only a woman, too, was Deianira, the heroine of the _Trachiniae_, and
though of exalted rank she fully realized this fact. When Hercules
first took her to Tiryns, he was still sufficiently interested in her
to shoot a hydra-poisoned arrow into the centaur Nessus, who attempted
to assault her while carrying her across the river Evenus. But after
she had borne him several children he neglected her, going off on
adventures to capture other women. She weeps because of his absence,
complaining that for fifteen months she has had no message from him.
At last information is brought to her that Hercules, inflamed with
violent love for the Princess Iole, had demanded her for a secret
union, and when the king refused, had ravaged his city and carried off
Iole, to be unto him more than a slave, as the messenger gives her to
understand distinctly. On receiving this message; Deianira is at first
greatly agitated, but soon remembers what the duty of a Greek wife is.
"I am well aware," she says in substance, "that we cannot expect a man
to be always content with one woman. To antagonize the god of love, or
to blame my husband for succumbing to him, would be foolish. After
all, what does it amount to? Has not Hercules done this sort of thing
many times before? Have I ever been angry with him for so often
succumbing to this malady? His concubines, too, have never received an
unkind word from me, nor shall Iole; for I freely confess, resentment
does not become a woman. Yet I am distressed, for I am old and Iole is
young, and she will hereafter be his actual wife in place of me." At
this thought jealousy sharpens her wit and she remembers that the
dying centaur had advised her to save some of his blood and, if ever
occasion should come for her to wish to bring back her husband's love,
to anoint his garment with it. She does so, and sends it to him,
without knowing that its effect will be to slowly burn the flesh off
his body. Hearing of the deadly effect of her gift, she commits
suicide, while Hercules spends the few remaining hours of his life
cursing her who murdered him, "the best of all men," and wishing she
were suffering in his place or that he might mutilate her body. Nor
was his latest and "violent love" for Iole more than a passing
appetite quickly appeased; for at the end he asks his son to marry
her!

This drama admirably illustrates the selfish view of the marital
relation entertained by Greek men. Its moral may be summed up in this
advice to a wife:

"If your husband falls in love with a younger woman and
brings her home, let him, for he is a victim of Cupid
and cannot help it. Display no jealousy, and do not
even try to win back his love, for that might annoy him
or cause mischief."

In other words, _The Trachiniae_ is an object-lesson to Greek wives,
telling us what the men thought they ought to be. Probably some of the
wives tried to live up to that ideal; but that could hardly be
accepted as genuine, spontaneous devotion deserving the name of
affection. Most famous among all the tragedies of the Greeks, and
deservedly so, is the _Antigone_. Its plot can be told in such a way
as to make it seem a romantic love-story, if not a story of romantic
love. Creon, King of Thebes, has ordered, under penalty of death, that
no one shall bestow the rites of burial on Prince Polynices, who has
fallen after bearing arms against his own country. Antigone, sister of
Polynices, resolves to disobey this cruel order, and having failed to
persuade her sister, Ismene, to aid her, carries out her plan alone.
Boldly visiting the place where the body is exposed to the dogs and
vultures, she sprinkles dust on it and pours out libations, repeating
the process the next day on finding that the guards had meanwhile
undone her work. This time she is apprehended in the act and brought
before the king, who condemns her to be immured alive in a tomb,
though she is betrothed to his son Haemon. "Would you murder the bride
of your own son?" asks Ismene; but the king replies that there are
many other women in the world. Haemon now appears and tries to move
his father to mercy, but in vain, though he threatens to slay himself
if his bride is killed. Antigone is immured, but at last, moved by the
advice of the Chorus and the dire predictions of the seer Tiresias,
Creon changes his mind and hastens with men and tools to liberate the
virgin. When he arrives at the tomb he sees his son in it, clinging to
the corpse of Antigone, who had hanged herself. Horrified, the king
begs his son to come out of the tomb, but Haemon seizes his sword and
rushes forward to slay his father. The king escapes the danger by
flight, whereupon Haemon thrusts the sword into his own body, and
expires, clasping the corpse of his bride.

If we thus make Haemon practically the central figure of the tragedy,
it resembles a romantic love-story; but in reality Haemon is little
more than an episode. He has a quarrel with his father (who goes so
far as to threaten to kill his bride in his presence), rushes off in a
rage, and the tomb scene is not enacted, but merely related by a
messenger, in forty lines out of a total of thirteen hundred and
fifty. Much less still have we here a story of romantic love. Not one
of the fourteen ingredients of love can be found in it except
self-sacrifice, and that not of the right kind. I need not explain
once more that suicide from grief over a lost bride does not benefit
that bride; that it is not altruistic, but selfish, unmanly, and
cowardly, and is therefore no test whatever of love. Moreover, if we
examine the dialogue in detail we see that the motive of Haemon's
suicide is not even grief over his lost bride, but rage at his father.
When on first confronting Creon, he is thus accosted: "Have you heard
the sentence pronounced on your bride?" He answers meekly: "I have, my
father, and I yield to your superior wisdom, which no marriage can
equal in excellence;" and it is only gradually that his ire is aroused
by his father's abusive attitude; while at the end his first intention
was to slay his father, not himself. Had Sophocles understood love as
we understand it, he would have represented Haemon as drawing his
sword at once and moving heaven and earth to prevent his bride from
being buried alive.

But it is in examining the attitude of Antigone that we realize most
vividly how short this drama falls of being a love-story. She never
even mentions Haemon, has no thought of him, but is entirely absorbed
in the idea of benefiting the spirit of her dead brother by performing
the forbidden funeral rites. As if to remove all doubt on that point,
she furthermore tells us explicitly (lines 904-912) that she would
have never done such a deed, in defiance of the law, to save a husband
or a child, but only for a brother; and why? because she might easily
find another husband, and have new children by him, but another
brother she could never have, as her parents were dead.[303]


WOMAN AND LOVE IN EURIPIDES

Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, that
woman plays an insignificant rôle in his dramas. Most of the nineteen
plays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are named
after women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that
"he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us
_intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes."
But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences
"the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment."
There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in the
relations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters;
but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is only
sensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or sham
sentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instances
of it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband she
intended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles,
whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously with
his unloving actions. These, however, are mere episodes, while
Euripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is an
exposition of sentimentality.

The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approached
the ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another person
voluntarily consented to die in his place. His aged parents had no
heart to "plunge into the darkness of the tomb" for his sake. "It is
not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his father
informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thou
art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of
life, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart to die for thy
own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth I
shall justly hold e'en as mother and as father too, and none but her."
This "stranger" is his wife Alcestis, who has volunteered to die for
him, exclaiming:

"Thee I set before myself, and instead of living have
ensured thy life, and so I die, though I need not have died
for thee, but might have taken for my husband whom I would
of the Thessalians, and have had a home blest with royal
power; reft of thee, with my children orphans, I cared not
to live."

The world has naïvely accepted this speech and the sacrifice of
Alcestis as belonging to the region of sentiment; but in reality it is
nothing more than one of those stories shrewdly invented by selfish
men to teach women that the object of their existence is to sacrifice
themselves for their husbands. The king's father tells us this in so
many words: "By the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life _a
noble example for all her sex_;" adding that "such marriages I declare
are gain to man, else to wed is not worth while." If these stories,
like those manufactured by the Hindoos, were an indication of existing
conjugal sentiment, would it be possible that the self-sacrifice was
invariably on the woman's side? Adinetus would have never dreamt of
sacrificing _his_ life for his wife. He is not even ashamed to have
her die for him. It is true that he has one moment when he fancies his
foe deriding him thus:

"Behold him living in his shame, a wretch who quailed at
death himself, but of his coward heart gave up his wedded
wife instead, and escaped from Hades; doth he deem himself a
man after that?"

It is true also that his father taunts him contemptuously,

"Dost thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven
heart!... A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off
death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die
instead of thee."

Yet Admetus is constantly assuring everyone of his undying attachment
to his wife. He holds her in his arms, imploring her not to leave him.
"If thou die," he exclaims,

"I can no longer live; my life, my death, are in thy hands; thy
love is what I worship.... Not a year only, but all my life will
I mourn for thee.... In my bed thy figure shall be laid full
length, by cunning artists fashioned; thereon will I throw myself
and, folding my arms about thee, call upon thy name, and think I
hold my dear wife in my embrace.... Take me, O take me, I
beseech, with thee 'neath the earth;"

and so on, _ad nauseam_--a sickening display of sentimentality,
_i.e._, fond words belied by cowardly, selfish actions.

The father-in-law of Alcestis, in his indignation at his son's
impertinence and lack of filial pity, exclaims that what made Alcestis
sacrifice herself was "want of sense;" which is quite true. But in
painting such a character, Euripides's chief motive appears to have
been to please his audience by enforcing a maxim which the Greeks
shared with the Hindoos and barbarians that "a woman, though bestowed
upon a worthless husband, must be content with him." These words are
actually put by him into the mouth of Andromache in the play of that
name. Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector, now the
concubine of Achilles's son, is made to declare to the Chorus that "it
is not beauty but virtuous acts that win a husband's heart;" whereupon
she proceeds to spoil this fine maxim by explaining what the Greeks
understood by "virtuous acts" in a wife--namely, subordinating herself
even to a "worthless husband." "Suppose," she continues, "thou hadst
wedded a prince of Thrace... where one lord shares his affections with
a host of wives, would'st thou have slain them? If so, thou would'st
have set a stigma of insatiate lust on all our sex." And she proceeds
to relate how she herself paid no heed in Troy to Hector's amours with
other women: "Oft in days gone by I held thy bastard babes to my own
breast, to spare thee any cause for grief. By this course I bound my
husband to me by virtue's chains." To spare _him_ annoyance, no matter
how much his conduct might grieve _her_--that was the Greek idea of
conjugal devotion--all on one side. And how like the Hindoos, and
Orientals, and barbarians in general, is the Greek seen to be in the
remarks made by Hermione, the legitimate wife, to Andromache, the
concubine--accusing the latter of having by means of witchcraft made
her barren and thus caused her husband to hate her.

With the subtle ingenuity of masculine selfishness the Greek dramatist
doubles the force of all his fine talk about the "virtuous acts" of
wives by representing the women themselves as uttering these maxims
and admitting that their function is self-denial--that woman is
altogether an inferior and contemptible being. "How strange it is,"
exclaims Andromache,

"that, though some god has devised cures for mortals against
the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught
to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's
sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to
mankind."

Hermione declares:

"Oh! never, never--this truth will I repeat--should men
of sense, who have wives, allow women-folks to visit
them in their homes, for they teach them mischief; one,
to gain some private end, helps to corrupt their honor;
another having made a slip herself, wants a companion
in misfortune, while many are wantons; and hence it is
men's houses are tainted. Wherefore keep strict guard
upon the portals of your houses with bolts and bars."

Bolts and bars were what the gallant Greek men kept their wives under,
hence this custom too is here slyly justified out of a woman's mouth.
And thus it goes on throughout the pages of Euripides. Iphigenia, in
one of the two plays devoted to her, declares: "Not that I shrink from
death, if die I must,--when I have saved thee; no, indeed! for a man's
loss from his family is felt, while a woman's is of little moment." In
the other she declares that one man is worth a myriad of
Women--[Greek: heis g' anaer kreisson gunaikon murion]--wherefore, as
soon as she realizes the situation at Aulis, she expresses her
willingness to be immolated on the altar in order that the war against
Troy may no longer be delayed by adverse minds. She had, however, come
for a very different purpose, having been, with her queen mother,
inveigled from home under the pretext that Achilles was to make her
his wife. Achilles, however, knew as little of the plot as she did,
and he is much surprised when the queen refers to his impending
marriage. A modern poet would have seen here a splendid, seemingly
inevitable, opportunity for a story of romantic love. He would have
made Achilles fall in love at sight of Iphigenia and resolve to save
her life, if need be at the cost of his own. What use does Euripides
make of this opportunity? In his play Achilles does not see the girl
till toward the close of the tragedy. He promises her unhappy mother
that "never shall thy daughter, after being once called my bride, die
by her father's hand;" But his reason for this is not love for a girl
or a chivalrous attitude toward women in distress, but offended
vanity. "It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus," he
exclaims; "there be maids unnumbered, eager to have my love--no! but
King Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leave
to use my name as a means to catch the child." In that case he "would
never have refused" to further his fellow-soldiers' common interest by
allowing the maiden to be sacrificed.

It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaring
that a woman's life was of no account anyway, and that she had
resolved to die voluntarily for the army's sake, Achilles assumes a
different attitude, declaring,

"Some god was bent on blessing me, could I but have won
thee for my wife.... But now that I have looked into
thy noble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to
win thee for my bride,"

and promising to protect her against the whole army. But what was it
in Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration? A feminine trait, such
as would impress a modern romantic lover? Not in the least. He admired
her because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf of
the manly virtue of patriotism. Greek men admired women only in so far
as they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.

It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedy
a story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himself
above his times by a miracle. To him, as to all his contemporaries,
love was not a sentiment, "an illumination of the senses by the soul,"
an impulse to noble actions, but a common appetite, apt to become a
species of madness, a disease. His _Hippolytus_ is a study of this
disease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawless
pathologic love of Phædra for her step-son. She is "seized with wild
desire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel
scourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself all
food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her
fading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyes
the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her
soul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to yield to her "sickly
passion" would be "infamous;" yet she cannot suppress her wanton
thoughts. Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greek
poets, Euripides makes a woman--"a thing the world detests"--the
victim of this mad passion, opposing to it the coy resistance of a
man, a devotee of the chaste Diana. And at the end he makes Phaedra,
before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save her
reputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of her
infatuation.

To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwide
difference between lust and love. But Euripides knows no such
difference. To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies only
in being moderate in some cases, excessive in others. Love is "at once
the sweetest and the bitterest thing," according as it is one or the
other of the two. Phaedra's nurse deplores her passion, chiefly
because of its violence. The chorus in _Medea_ (627 _seqq_.) sings:

"When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he
brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian
queen in moderate might approach, no goddess is so full
of charm as she."

And in _Iphigenia at Aulis_ the chorus declares:

"Happy they who find the goddess come in moderate might,
sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage
and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions.... Be
mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek: hosioi]
desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess
therein."

To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in the
loves of gods and goddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, and
the lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in _Hippolytus_:

"O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion
borne, flits the god of love, maddening the heart and
beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage
whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures
of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris,
thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them
all."[304]


ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE

The Greeks, instead of confuting my theory that romantic love is the
last product of civilization, afford the most striking confirmation of
it. While considering the love-affairs of Africans, Australians, and
other uncivilized peoples, we were dealing with races whose lack of
intelligence and delicacy in general made it natural to expect that
their love, too, must be wanting in psychic qualities and refinement.
But the Greeks were of a different calibre. Not only their men of
affairs--generals and statesmen--but their men of thought and
feeling--philosophers and poets--were among the greatest the world has
ever seen; yet these philosophers and poets--who, as everywhere, _must
have been far above the emotional level of their countrymen in
general_--knew nothing of romantic love. What makes this the more
remarkable is that, so far as their minds were concerned, they were
quite capable of experiencing such a feeling. Indeed, they were
actually familiar with the psychic and altruistic ingredients of love;
sympathy, devotion, self-sacrifice, affection, are sometimes
manifested in their dramas and stories when dealing with the love
between parents and children, brothers and sisters, or pairs of
friends like Orestes and Pylades. And strangest of all, they actually
had a kind of romantic love, which, except for one circumstance, is
much like modern romantic love.

Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments that
remain to us of his lost tragedies is one from _Dictys_, in which
occurs this sentiment:

"He was my friend, and never did love lead me to folly
or to Cypris. Yes, there is another kind of love, love
for the soul, honorable, continent, and good. Surely
men should have passed a law that only the chaste and
self-contained should love, and Cypris [Venus] should
have been banished."

Now it is very interesting to note that Euripides was a friend of
Socrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science of
love, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this
science in several of their works. In Xenophon's _Symposium_
Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything else
in the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather _give_
all he had to the beloved than _receive_ twice the amount from
another; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone; rather work
and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, he
continues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers

"makes them more generous, more eager to exert
themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers,
nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing
them to avoid even that to which the strongest appetite
urges them."

Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the _Symposium_ and
_Phaedrus_, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception
of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its
altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the
speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the _Symposium_ (175-78), in
which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to
us. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than
a virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than
do a cowardly or dishonorable deed; and love would make an inspired
hero out of the veriest coward. "Love will make men dare to die for
the beloved--love alone." "The actions of a lover have a grace which
ennobles them." "From this point of view a man fairly argues that in
Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing." "There is a
dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of
political power." "For when the lover and beloved come together ...
the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to
his gracious loving one." And in the _Republic_ (VI., 485): "He whose
nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or
is akin to the object of his affections."[305]

All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one
circumstance--a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is an
ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas
the romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato--so-called "Platonic
love"--has nothing whatever to do with women. It is a passionate,
romantic friendship between men and boys, which (whether it really
existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only noble,
exalted form of the passion that is presided over by Eros. On this
point they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for a
Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the noble act of
sacrificing her life for her husband--_that_ is her ideal function, as
we have seen--so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her
life; yet Plato tells us distinctly (_Symp_., 180) that this phase of
feminine love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles to
give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend
Patroclus.[306] What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from the
lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and this
kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women.
In discussing this higher kind of love both Plato and Xenophon
consistently and persistently ignore women, and not only do they
ignore them, but they deliberately distinguish between two goddesses
of love, one of whom, the celestial, presides--not over refined love
between men and women, as we would say--but over the friendships
between men only, while the feelings toward women are always inspired
by the common goddess of sensual love. In Plato's _Symposium_ (181)
this point is made clear by Pausanias:

"The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite
is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being
such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be
of women as well as of youths, and is of the body
rather than of the soul.... But the offspring of the
heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose
birth the female has no part,--she is from the male
only; this is that love which is of youths, and the
goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in
her."


PLATONIC LOVE OF WOMEN

In thus excluding women from the sphere of pure, super-sensual
romantic love, Plato shows himself a Greek to the marrow. In the Greek
view, to be a woman was to be inferior to man from every point of
view--even personal beauty. Plato's writings abound in passages which
reveal his lofty contempt for women. In the _Laws_ (VI., 781) he
declares that "women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and
when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of
resistance, and be far too much for the legislator." While unfolding,
in _Timaeus_ (91), his theory of the creation of man, he says
gallantly that "of the men who came into the world, those who were
cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have
changed into the nature of women in the second generation;" and on
another page (42) he puts the same idea even more insultingly by
writing that the man

"who lived well during his appointed time was to return
and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a
blessed existence. But if he failed in attaining this,
at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if,
when in that state of being, he did not desist from
evil, he would continually be changed into some brute
who resembled him in the evil nature which he had
acquired."

In other words, in Plato's mind a woman ranks half-way between a man
and a brute. "Woman's nature," he says, "is inferior to that of men in
capacity for virtue" (_Laws_, VI., 781); and his idea of ennobling a
woman consists in making her resemble a man, giving her the same
education, the same training in athletics and warlike exercises, in
wrestling naked with each other, even though the old and ugly would be
laughed at (_Republic_, Bk. V.). Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters,
will, in his ideal republic, go to war together.

"Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years,
and for a woman if there appear any need of making use
of her in military service, let the time of service be
after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty
years of age" (_Laws_, VI., 785).

Having thus abolished woman, except as a breeder of sons, Plato
proceeds to eliminate marriage and morality. "The brave man is to have
more wives than others, and he is to have first choice in such matters
more than others" (_Republic_, V., 468). All wives, however, must be
in common, no man having a monopoly of a woman. Nor must there be any
choice or preference for individuals. The mothers are to be arranged
by officials, who will see that the good pair with the good, the bad
with the bad, the offspring of the latter being destroyed, just as is
done in the breeding of animals. Maternal and filial love also must be
abolished, infants being taken from their mothers and educated in
common. Nor must husband and wife remain together longer than is
necessary for the perpetuation of the species. This is the only object
of marriage in Plato's opinion; for he recommends (_Laws_, VI., 784)
that if a couple have no children after being married ten years, they
should be "divorced for their mutual benefit."

In all history there is not a more extraordinary spectacle than that
presented by the greatest philosopher of Greece, proposing in his
ideal republic to eliminate every variety of family affection, thus
degrading the relations of the sexes to a level inferior in some
respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow
mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most
radical enemy love has ever known--practically a champion of
promiscuity--has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to the
purest and most exalted form of love![307]


SPARTAN OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE

Had Plato lived a few centuries earlier he might have visited at least
one Greek state where his barbarous ideal of the sexual relations was
to a considerable extent realized. The Spartan law-maker Lycurgus
shared his views regarding marriage, and had the advantage of being
able to enforce them. He, too, believed that human beings should be
bred like cattle. He laughed, so Plutarch tells us in his biographic
sketch, at those who, while exercising care in raising dogs and
horses, allowed unworthy husbands to have offspring. This, in itself,
was a praiseworthy thought; but the method adopted by Lycurgus to
overcome that objection was subversive of all morality and affection.
He considered it advisable that among worthy men there should be a
community of wives and children, for which purpose he tried to
suppress jealousy, ridiculing those who insisted on a conjugal
monopoly and who even engaged in fights on account of it. Elderly men
were urged to share their wives with younger men and adopt the
children as their own; and if a man considered another's wife
particularly prolific or virtuous he was not to hesitate to ask for
her. Bridegrooms followed the custom of capturing their brides. An
attendant, after cutting off the bride's hair and putting a man's
garment on her, left her alone in the dark, whereupon her bridegroom
visited her, returning soon, however, to his comrades. For
months--sometimes until after children had been born--the husband
would thus be unable to see his wife.

Reading Greek literature in the light of modern science, it is
interesting to note that we have in the foregoing account unmistakable
allusions to several primitive customs which have prevailed among
savages and barbarians in all parts of the world.[308] The Greek
writers, ignorant of the revelations of anthropology regarding the
evolution of human habits, assumed such customs to have been
originated by particular lawgivers. This was natural enough and
pardonable under the circumstances; but how any modern writer can
consider such customs (whether aboriginal or instituted by lawgivers)
especially favorable to love, passes my comprehension. Yet one of the
best informed of my critics assured me that "in Sparta love was made a
part of state policy, and opportunities were contrived for the young
men and women to see each other at public games and become enamored."
As usual in such cases, the writer ignores the details regarding these
Spartan opportunities for seeing one another and falling in love,
which would have spoiled his argument by indicating what kind of
"love" was in question here.

Plutarch relates that Lycurgus made the girls strip naked and attend
certain festivals and dance in that state before the youths, who were
also naked. Bachelors who refused to marry were not allowed to attend
these dances, which, as Plutarch adds with characteristic Greek
naïveté, were "a strong incentive to marriage." The erudite C.O.
Müller, in his history of the Doric race (II., 298), while confessing
that in all his reading of Greek books he had not come across a single
instance of an Athenian in love with a free-born woman and marrying
her because of a strong attachment, declares that Sparta was somewhat
different, personal attachments having been possible there because the
young men and women were brought together at festivals and dances; but
he has the acumen to see that this love was "not of a romantic
nature."[309]


AMAZONIAN IDEAL OF GREEK WOMANHOOD

Romantic love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent on
sexual differentiation, and the highest phases of romantic love are
possible only, as we have seen, where the secondary and tertiary
sexual qualities, physical and mental, are highly developed. Now the
Spartans, besides maintaining all the love-suppressing customs just
alluded to, made special and systematic efforts to convert their women
into Amazons devoid of all feminine qualities except such as were
absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species. One of the
avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was
to destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty. The law which
forbade husbands to associate with their wives in the daytime
prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment
between husband and wife. Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far
as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if
their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in
case of defeat. The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutions
relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the
purpose of supplying the state with warriors. Not love, but
patriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions. To
patriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of these
women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were
reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men. Brought
up as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, when
they wanted companionship, always sought it in association with
comrades of their own sex. In a word, instead of honoring the female
sex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it. But they brought on
their own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairs
at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and
sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African
Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands
too.

And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the
Amazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate
man--has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and
progress!

"If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were
taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not
your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides,
thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one
other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Müller
alludes to it in the following (II., 304):

"Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they
involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as
Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of
Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of
Agis."

This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all
other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be
compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and
courage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears to
have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that
"each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"
yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more
than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste
housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to
man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have
liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to the
end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of
Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On
the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues
of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of
heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.

Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.
Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latin
names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are
Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,
as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly
marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on its
higher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that
"she is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of sex except the
gender, nothing of the woman except the form." She is the goddess,
among other things, of war. Diana spends all her time hunting and
slaughtering animals, and she is not only a perpetual virgin but
ascetically averse to love and feminine tenderness--as unsympathetic a
being as was ever conceived by human imagination--as unnatural and
ludicrous as her devotee, the Hippolytus of Euripides. She is the
Amazon of Amazons, and was represented dressed as an Amazon. Of course
she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the
question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their
ultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, for
example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle _(Eth. Nicom_., IV., 7),
[Greek: to kallos en megalo somati, hoi mikroi d' asteioi kai
summetroi, kaloi d' ou.]--"beauty consists in a large body; the petite
are pretty and symmetrical, but not beautiful."[311]


ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM

Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we
examine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, we
find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially
in Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respect
Athens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestled
naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted to
witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions
about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused
the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the
Athenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these
words:

"Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife,
leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth
the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No!
a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would,
who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her
robe float free, to share with youth their races and
their sports--customs I cannot away with. Is it any
wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue?"

The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spartan educate
his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by
locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the