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English Literatures
The Greek View of Woman
Author: G. Lowes Dickinson
Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the *Hellenic1 from the modern view of life than the estimate in which women were held by the Greeks. Their opinion on this point was partly the cause and partly the effect of that preponderance of the idea of the state on which we have already dwelt, and from which it followed naturally enough that marriage should be regarded primarily as a means of producing healthy and efficient citizens. This view is best illustrated by the institutions of such a state as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was specially trained for maternity, and connexions outside the marriage tie were sanctioned by custom and opinion, if they were such as were likely to lead to healthy offspring. Further is may be noted that in almost every state the exposure of deformed or sickly infants was encouraged by law, the child being thus regarded, from the beginning, as a member of the state, rather than as a member of the family.
The same view is reflected in the speculations of political philosophers. Plato, indeed, in his Republic, goes so far as to eliminate the family relation altogether. Not only is the whole connexion between men and women to be regulated by the state, in respect both of the persons and of the limit of age within which they may associate, but the children as soon as they are born are to be carried off to a common nursery, there to be reared together, undistinguished by the mothers, who will suckle indifferently any infant that might happen to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as in other instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits set by the current sentiment of the Greeks, and in his later work is reluctantly constrained to abandon his scheme of community of wives and children. Yet even there he makes it compulsory on every man to marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, under penalty of fine and *civil disabilities2. Plato, no doubt, as we have said, exaggerates the opinions of his time; but the view, which he pushes to its extreme, of the subordination of the family to the state, was one, as we have already pointed out, which did predominate in Greece. It appears in a soberer form in the treatise of Aristotle. He too would regulate by law both the age at which marriages should take place and the number of children that should be produced, and would have all deformed infants exposed. And here, no doubt, he is speaking in conformity if not with the practice, at least with the feeling of Greece. The modern conception that any individual has a right to wed whom and when he will, and to produce children at his own discretion, regardless of all considerations of health and decency, was one altogether alien to the Greeks. In theory, at least and to some extent in practice (as for example in the case of Sparta), they recognized that the production of children was a business of supreme import to the state, and that it was right and proper that it should be regulated by law with a view to the advantage of the whole community.
And if now we turn from considering the family in its relation to the state to regard it in its relation to the individual, we are struck once more by a divergence from the modern point of view or rather from the view which is supposed to prevail, particularly by writers of fiction, at any rate in modern English life. In ancient Greece, so far as our knowledge goes, there was little or no romance connected with the marriage tie. Marriage was a means of producing legitimate children; that is how it is defined by Demosthenes, and we have no evidence that it was ever regarded as anything more. In Athens we know that marriages were commonly arranged by the father, much as they are in modern France, on grounds of age, property, connexion and the like, and without any regard for the inclination of the parties concerned. And an interesting passage in Xenophon indicate a point of view quite consonant with this accepted practice. God, he says, ordained the institution of marriage; but on what grounds? Not in the least for the sake of the personal relation that might be established between the husband and wife, but for ends quite external and indifferent to any affection that might exist between them. First, for the perpetuation of the human race; secondly, to raise up protectors for the father in his old age; thirdly, to secure an appropriate division of labour, the man performing the outdoor work, the women guarding and superintending at home and each thus fulfilling duly the function for which they were designed by nature. This eminently prosaic way of conceiving the marriage relation is also, it would seem, eminently Greek; and it leads us to consider more particularly the opinion prevalent in Greece of the nature and duty of women in general.
Here the first point to be noticed is the wide difference of the view represented in the Homeric poems from that which meets us in the historic period. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey will find depicted there, amid all the barbarity of an age of repine and war, relations between men and women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they may almost stand as universal types of the ultimate human ideal. Such for example is the relation between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waiting year by year for the husband whose fate is unknown, wooed in vain by suitors who waste her substance and wear her life, nightly ‘watering her bed with her tears’ for twenty weary years, till at last the wanderer returns, and ‘at once her knees were loosened and her heart melted within her… and she fell a weeping and ran straight towards him, and cast her hands about his neck, and kissed his head’; for ‘even as the sight of the land is welcome to mariners, so welcome to her was the sight of her lord, and her white arms would never quite leave hold of his neck.’
Such, again, is the relation between Hector and Andromache as described in the well-known scene of the Iliad, where the wife comes out with her babe to take leave of the husband on his way to battle. ‘It were better for me,’ she cries, ‘to go down to the grave if I lose thee; for never will any comfort be mine when once thou, even thou, hast met thy fate, but only sorrow… Thou art to me father and lady mother, yea, and brother, even as thou art my goodly husband. Come now, have pity and abide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy child an orphan and thy wife a widow.’ Hector answers with the plea of honour. He cannot draw back but he foresees defeat; and in his anticipation of the future nothing is so bitter as the fate he fears for his wife.
If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of the Greeks, we might conclude, from such passages as these, that they had a conception of woman and of her relation to man, finer and nobler in some respects, than that of modern times. But in fact the Homeric poems represent a civilization which had passed away before the opening of the period with which at present we are chiefly concerned. And in the interval, for reasons which we need not here attempt to state, a change had taken place in the whole way of regarding the female sex. So far, at any rate, as our authorities enable us to judge, woman in the historic age was conceived to be so inferior to man that he recognized in her no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his children. Romance and the higher championship of intellect and spirit do not appear (with certain notable exceptions) to have been commonly sought or found in this relation. Woman, in fact, was regarded as a means, not as an end; and was treated in a manner consonant with this view. Of this estimate many illustrations might be adduced from the writers of the fifth and fourth centuries. Plato, for example, classes together ‘children, women, and servants,’ and states generally that there is no branch of human industry in which the female sex is not inferior to the male. Similarly, Aristotle insists again and again on the natural inferiority of woman, and illustrates it by such quaint observations as the following: ‘A man would be considered a coward who was only as brave as a brave woman, and a woman as a chatterbox who was only as modest as a good man.’…
In accordance with this conception of the inferiority of the female sex, and partly as a cause, partly as an effect of it, we find that the position of the wife in ancient Greece was simply that of the domestic drudge. To stay at home and mind the house was her recognized ideal. ‘A free woman should be bounded by the street door,’ says one of the characters in Menander; and another writer discriminates as follows the functions of the two sexes: ‘War, politics, and public speaking are the sphere of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay at home and to receive and tend her husband.’
The conception thus indicated in burlesque of the proper place of woman is expressed more seriously, from the point of view of the average man, in the Oeconomicus of Xenophon. Ischomachus, the hero of that work, gives an account of his own wife, and of the way in which he had trained her. When he married her, he explains, she was not yet fifteen, and had been brought up with the utmost care ‘that she might see, hear, and ask as little as possible.’ Her accomplishments were weaving and a sufficient acquaintance with all that concerns the stomach; and her attitude towards her husband she expressed in the single phrase; ‘Everything rests with you; my duty, my mother said, is simply to be modest.’ Ischomachus proceeds to explain to her the place he expects her to fill; she is to suckle his children, to cook, and to superintend the house; and for this purpose God has given her special gifts, different from but not necessarily inferior to those of man. Husband and wife naturally supply one another’s deficiencies, and if the wife performs her function worthily she may even make herself the ruling partner, and be sure that as she grows older she will be held not less but more in honour, as the guardian of her children and the stewardess of her husband’s goods.
Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications, both in theory and practice, of a protest against it. In Sparta, as we have already noticed, girls, instead of being confined to the house, were brought up in the open air among the boys, trained in gymnastics and accustomed to run and wrestle naked. And Plato, modelling his view upon this experience, makes no distinction of the sexes in his ideal republic. Women, he admits, are generally inferior to men, but they have similar, if lower, capacities and powers. There is no occupation or art for which they may not be fitted by nature and education; and he would therefore have them take their share in government and war, as well as in the various mechanical trades. ‘None of the occupations,’ he says, ‘which comprehend the ordering of a state, belong to woman as woman, nor yet to man as man; but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike; and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to all pursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weaker than the man.’
In adopting this attitude Plato stands alone not only among the Greeks, but one might almost say, among mankind, till we come to the latest views of the nineteenth century. But there is another Greek, the poet Euripides, who, without advancing any theory about the proper position of women, yet displays so intimate an understanding of their difficulties, and so warm and close a sympathy with their griefs, that some of his utterances may stand to all time as documents of the dumb and age-long protest of the weaker against the stronger sex. In illustration we may cite the following lines from the Medea, applicable, mutatis mutandis, to how many generations of suffering wives?
‘Of all things that have life and sense we women are most wretched. For we are compelled to buy with gold a husband who is also–worst of all! — the master of our person. And on his character, good or bad, our whole fate depends. For divorce is regarded as a disgrace to a woman and she cannot repudiate her husband. Then coming as she does into the midst of manners and customs strange to her, she would need the gift of divination–unless she has been taught at home–to know how best to treat her bed-fellow. And if we manage so well that our husband remains faithful to us, and does not break away, we may think ourselves fortunate; if not, there is nothing for it but death. A man when he is vexed at home can go out and find relief among his friends or acquaintances; but we women have none to look to but him. They tell us we live a sheltered life at home while they go to the wars; but that is nonsense. For I would rather go into battle thrice than bear a child once.’
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