Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) FEMINISM IN GREEK LITERATURE _Other Books by F. A. WRIGHT_ THE GIRDLE OF APHRODITE THE ARTS IN GREECE THE LETTERS OF ALCIPHRON (_May, 1923_) THE LOVERâS HANDBOOK (_in preparation_) FEMINISM IN GREEK LITERATURE FROM HOMER TO ARISTOTLE BY F. A. WRIGHT LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1923 Printed in Great Britain by MACKAYS LTD., Chatham. MANIBUS A. W. VERRALL Î¤Î¡ÎÎ¦ÎÎÎ CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 I. THE EARLY EPIC 7 II. THE IONIANS AND HESIOD 16 III. THE LYRIC POETS 28 IV. THE MILESIAN TALES 43 V. ATHENS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY 57 VI. ÃSCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES 70 VII. EURIPIDES 86 VIII. EURIPIDES: THE FOUR FEMINIST PLAYS 113 IX. THE SOCRATIC CIRCLE 135 X. ARISTOPHANES 150 XI. PLATO 168 XII. THE ATTIC ORATORS 183 XIII. ARISTOTLE 202 INTRODUCTION There is a question sometimes put to scholars, a doubt often latent in scholarsâ mindsâHow was it that Greek civilisation, with all its high ideals and achievements, fell so easily before what seems at first sight an altogether inferior culture? The difficulty is not solved by a reference to military resources or administrative skill, for moral strength is the only thing that matters in history, and a nation has never yet succeeded merely by pure intellect or by brute force. The fact isâand it is as well to state it plainlyâthat the Greek world perished from one main cause, a low ideal of womanhood and a degradation of women which found expression both in literature and in social life. The position of women and the position of slavesâfor the two classes went togetherâwere the canker-spots which, left unhealed, brought about the decay first of Athens and then of Greece. For many centuries in Ionia and Athens there was an almost open state of sex-war. At Miletus a woman never sat at table with her husband, for he was the enemy with whom bread must not be broken; at Athens, while all the men went free, women were kept as slaves, and a stranger in the harem might be killed at sight. The sexes were sharply separated: men and women had but few opportunities for mutual esteem and affection, and domestic lifeâthe life of the home, the wife and the childrenâwas poisoned at its source. The causes and results of this war, far worse than any faction or civil strife, are lamentable enough: its manifestations in ancient literature are perhaps even more important, for it is hard to say how far current opinions of feminine disabilities are not unconsciously due to the long line of writers, Greek and Latin, from Simonides of Amorgos, in the seventh century before Christ, to Juvenal in the second century of our era, who used all their powers of rhetoric and literary skill to disparage and depreciate womankind. In the whole deplorable business men were in the wrong, and they therefore took the aggressive. They applied to women the comforting doctrine of Aristotle, that some people were slaves because they were made by nature to be slaves: women were menâs moral inferiors, and therefore it was menâs duty to keep them down. At Sparta certainly, and perhaps in North Greece, women occupied a very different place. Spartan women were regarded as free human beings, and the relations between the sexes were inestimably better than at Athens. But Sparta, Thessaly, Macedonia, have no direct representation in Greek literature; we get their point of view only in the writings of some Athenians, such as Plato and Xenophon, who rebelled against the current institutions of their state, and in the Alexandrian poets, Apollonius and Theocritus, who, even in the midst of the luxurious city, kept some of the freshness of their native hills. Most of the great writers came from Ionia or from Athens: the Ionians are nearly all misogynists, and have succeeded in colouring many parts of the Homeric poems with their perverse immorality: the typical Athenian, and those foreigners who found their ideal in AthensâHerodotus, Sophocles, Thucydides, the Oratorsâusually treat women as a negligible quantity. Ãschylus was an original thinker, and in this, as in many ways, took a different view from most of his countrymen. But it is not until we come to Euripides that we get the womanâs side of the case definitely stated. Euripides ventured to doubt manâs infallibility: he put the doctrine of the nobility of man, as he put the other doctrines of the nobility of race and the nobility of war, to the touchstone of a really critical intelligence, and he came to a conclusion very different from that which is expressed by the great majority of his predecessors. Upon his own generation Euripides had a profound effect. Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon are all feminists in varying degrees, and a fairly full statement of feminist doctrine may be found in their works. But the idealist did not win the day. It is true that women were never so degradedâin European civilisation at leastâafter Euripidesâ time as they had been before; but his teaching did not bear its full fruit. Aristotleâthe supreme type of the practical mindâthrew all the weight of his unexampled influence into the other scale, and the Aristotelian view of the natural inferiority of women prevailed: so that the poets of Ionia, libertines and profligates as most of them were, find their work completed by the philosopher of Stagirus. Greek is the source from which most Roman writers drew their inspiration, and although the position of the Roman matron, honoured as the mother of the household, was infinitely higher than that of the too-often childless Athenian wife, there is still an undercurrent of misogyny which permeates Latin literature, and finds its fullest expression in Juvenal. All the venom of earlier writers is collected by the satirist, who adds the bitterness of his own bile, seasoned with the highly-coloured rhetoric which the Romans loved, and finally, with infinite zest, disgorges the mixture in the six hundred lines of the Sixth Satire. But, even as Aristotle sums up the final tendencies of Greek literature, so Juvenal represents almost the last effort of the anti-feminist school at Rome. The Christianity of the East and the romance of the North were already beginning to modify the grosser realism of the Mediterranean world, and towards the end of the second century the reaction came, when the Greek genius gave to the world the last, and perhaps the most fruitful, of all its gifts in literatureâthe romantic novel. Longus, in the _Daphnis and Chloe_, strikes a new note, and his hero is, perhaps, the first gentleman in matters of the affections that we find in ancient literature. The barbarian invasions soon came to devastate the land, but Longus had sown the seed, and he is the true father of all the love romances of mediÃ¦val chivalry. As Nausicaa is the first, so Chloe is almost the last of ancient heroines; and Greek literature, by a curious turn of fate, ironical enough considering its general tendency, ends as it begins, with the praise of the perfect maiden. I.âTHE EARLY EPIC Any discussion of Greek literature must begin with Homer, although as regards women and the social position the Epic in its first form stands somewhat aloof from the general current of ancient thought. The Homeric poems are in a very real sense the Greek Bible, for they represent a standard of morality which in many respects is far higher than that which prevailed at Athens in the great era of Greek history, and they picture a state of society very different from the complex civilisation of the city-state. It must be remembered that the Homeric poems were not written to suit the taste of the old Mediterranean people, who, if we may trust the evidence of archÃ¦ology and certain signs in their language, had but a low code of sexual morality, and were inclined to regard women as mere instruments of pleasure. The Epic, in its original shape, was composed for the AchÃ¦an chiefs who came down into Greece from Central Europe, and in sexual matters were rather of the Scandinavian type. But the AchÃ¦ans were only a small ruling class, and were soon assimilated by the conquered peoples, whose language they adopted. A second tide of invasion by the northern tribes called Dorian led to somewhat more permanent results, but the original Mediterranean race was always far superior in numbers, and unless inter-marriage was prohibited by law it was only a matter of time for the primary racial type to reappear. Hence the interest of Greek history, which is one long process of inter-blending and change: the renascence of the conquered and the gradual disappearance of the conquerors. Hence also the difference of view in all feminist matters between Homer and much of the later Greek literature. The Odyssey especially, which, though perhaps later in composition than the original Iliad, has been less worked over and received fewer additions, is based on an entirely different idea of womanâs position from that which was held after the seventh century B.C. Samuel Butlerâs theory that the Odyssey was composed by a woman, perhaps Nausicaa herself, is hardly capable of exact proof, but at any rate women in the Odyssey are never degraded as they are in many of the later passages of the Iliad, and the one lewd passage, the first lay of Demodocus (in Book 8), âthe loves of Ares and Aphrodite,â is a plain interpolation, and a clumsy one at that. Women indeed pull the strings in the Odyssey: the goddess Athena, the nymphs, Calypso and Circe, and the mortals, Penelope and Nausicaa, are the principal actors in the drama. With both these latter there are traces of the old German custom of Mutterrecht: the kingship of the tribe seems to go on the womanâs side. The claimants to Odysseusâ chieftainship seek it through his wife; Nausicaa is the only daughter, and her marriage is of importance to all the tribe. So Calypso and Circe are represented as island-queens, living in independent sovereignty, and normally unconcerned with male companionship. Odysseus is to both very much in the position of a prince consort, and, being an active man, suffers severely from lack of occupation and lack of power. Athena is the guiding spirit of the whole action, and takes a motherly interest in the hero, but otherwise she is pure intelligence superior to man and quite free from any desire for manâs society. The women of the Odyssey follow her lead, and have little trace of that over-sexuality which is ascribed by later writers to all women as a natural trait. It cannot be said that the wise Penelope shows any womanish weakness in her constant love: she bears her husbandâs absence with resignation, and maintains his authority intact during a period of twenty years. On his return she is by no means over-anxious to recognise him. When the nurse tells her of the slaughter of the suitors by Odysseus she calls her a fool, and threatens her with punishment for disturbing a busy woman with idle tales. Telemachus chides her for her wilful stubbornness: Odysseus dresses himself in royal raiment, but fails to make any impression, and finally, in disgust, calls to the nurse to make him up a bed so that he may go off and sleep by himself, for, says he, this woman has a heart of iron in her breast. When at last she is convinced, she explains that her hesitation has been due to a well-founded distrust of men and their wiles, and she is content to let her husband go off the very next morning to visit the old Laertes. Again, Nausicaa has no traces of the timid shyness which is counted a virtue among harem women. She faces the half-naked Odysseus boldly, as he comes from the bush where he has been hiding âlike a lion of the hills, rained upon and buffeted by the wind, and his eyes are ablaze,â and in all her dealings with him she is a charming mixture of generosity and caution. Moreover, the morality of the Odyssey in all sexual matters is very high, and, if it is not offensive to say so, it is womenâs morality. There is very little appeal to the sensual man, and although Calypso and Circe were by later writers taken as types of the voluptuous female, their fascination in the Odyssey is left entirely to the imagination, and they are pictured as industrious housewives. The description is the same for bothââsinging in a sweet voice within doors as she walked to and fro before the loom.â Little or nothing is said of any physical attraction they may have possessed. So with the punishment meted out at the end of the story to the maid-servants who had accepted the embraces of the suitors. First, they carry out the corpses of their dead lovers, then they wash and cleanse the bloody floor, and finally they are hangedâtwelve of them togetherââlike thrushes or doves caught in a snare; and they struggled with their feet for a little while, but not for long.â It is one of the few ruthless passages in the poem: there is no tendency here to err on the side of indulgence to the sins of the flesh, and for such sins harsher measure is dealt out to the woman than to the man. But as significant as anything of the gulf between the Odyssey and later Greek literature is the treatment of the two famous sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra. Helen, to the later Greeks the type of the wanton, appears in the Odyssey as the faithful wife, respected and self-respecting, of King Menelaus. She lives in his palace, busy with domestic duties, and when she thinks of the past it is to rejoice over her return home and escape from Troy, âwhere,â she says, âI used to mourn over the cruel fate which Aphrodite sent upon me, when she led me from my beloved country, leaving behind me my daughter, my home, and my husband dear, who lacked nothing of perfection in mind or in body.â It is a very different picture from that of Parisâ mistress, as we have her in later stories, flying with a foreign youth from her lawful lord, and betraying her too fond master. So Clytemnestraâafter the lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries had worked up her storyâis that most dreadful figure to King Man, the regicide, the woman who dares, by craft and guile, to kill the man set over her as ruler. In all the later stories it is Clytemnestra who arranges the details of Agamemnonâs deathâthe bath, the enveloping robe, and the axe; it is she who deals the fatal blow, while her lover, Ãgisthus, is a cowardly nonentity, entirely under the dominion of the woman. But in the Odyssey the story is very different. It is told twiceâby Agamemnon to Odysseus in Hades, and by Nestor to Telemachus at Pylos, and this last version is significant enough to be given word for word: We Greeks (says Nestor) were lingering over there at Troy, and many a task did we fulfil. But heâÃgisthusâat his ease in the quiet valleys of Argos, where the horses feed, tried to beguile the wife of Agamemnon with soft words. At first, of course, fair Clytemnestra refused to do the shameful thing, for she was a woman of honest heart. Moreover, there was with her a minstrel, whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy, had bidden to protect his wife. But soon the fate of heaven encompassed the minstrel, and brought him to his death, for Ãgisthus took him to a desert island and left him there, a prey for the birds to tear asunder. As for the queenâhe willing and she willingâhe led her to his house. And many a sacrifice did he offer to the gods when he had done that great deed, which never in his heart had he expected to accomplish. Such is the passage, and the last two sentences are a literal translation of the lines which appear thus in Popeâs version: Then virtue was no more: her guard away, She fell, to lust a voluntary prey. Even to the temple stalked the adulterous spouse With impious thanks and mockery of vows. For these are the dangers of poetical translation. But more important than any single character or episode is the general impression given by the whole poem, and it may fairly be said that the entire framework of the Odyssey presupposes a condition of society in which women are regarded as not in the least, _quÃ¢_ women, inferior to men. In the Iliad things are different, and the poem, as we have it now, gives us three distinct pictures of womenâs position in life. The original epic, the âWrath of Achillesâ has hardly any place for women at all. It is true that Achillesâ anger has for its cause the woman Briseis; but Achilles is angry, not at the loss of a woman whom he loves, but at the loss of a piece of property which he knows by experience to be of considerable value and service. Briseis is a slaveâa thing, not a person. In the whole Iliad she is only mentioned ten times, and nine times out of those ten she is merely catalogued as an article of value, with the slave-dealerâs epithet, âfair-cheeked,â attached. But this is hardly surprising. All the earlier portions of the Iliad are primarily lays of battle. They are anti-social, and woman has no part or lot in them. The Iliad however, is built up of many different strata, and one stratumâby no means the least importantâwas contributed by a poet who understood and sympathised with women. In thought and language he has many affinities with the author of the Odyssey, and he is probably responsible for the one passage in the poem where Briseis appears as a human being, and makes lament over the dead body of Patroclus: a speech which served Ovid as the groundwork wherefromâwith many embellishmentsâhe expands the letter in âthe Heroines.â From the same hand as Briseisâ speech comes the supreme scene of the parting between Hector and Andromache, and all the closing passages of the Iliad: the ransoming of Hector, and the lamentation of the womenâhis wife, his mother, and Helenâover the corpse. No one can read the Iliad without feeling that the moral spirit of all these passages is of a very different and of a very much higher quality than the brutality of the earliest lays, and the loose cynicism of the last additions to the poem, which we shall have next to consider. II.âTHE IONIANS AND HESIOD Between the Homeric poems in their first shape and the next stage of Greek literature there is a gap of centuries, and when the curtain goes up again on Greek history at the end of the eighth century, the centre of civilisation is in Asia Minor, the coast towns and their adjacent islands. The period of fighting, invasions, and tribal migrations is over: there has been a revival of the old Minoan culture, the Greeks have become a nation of traders living in luxurious cities, such as Miletus and Mytilene. Politically they are dependent on the great Eastern land empires, and from the East they have taken ideas which vitally affect the position of women. The first of these may be stated thus: a woman, even a free-born woman, is the property of the man who is her husband. The second, which follows from this, is that, love between man and his property being absurd, romantic affection is only conceivable between men; between man and woman it is impossible. Of these two ideas, the first, which involved the seclusion of women and the harem system, was only partially applied in ancient Greece. It flourished in Ionia and at Athens during the great period of her history, but it never took root in Sparta, or in the chief cities of Hellenistic civilisation. Its corollary, however, spread fatally from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to Italy. It lasted for many centuries, and tended to destroy all romantic love between the two sexes, and very often all the ordinary comfortable affection which may exist without romance between husband and wife. The sexes drew apart: the man, immersed in war and politics and absent from his home most of his life, had little experience of woman as a thinking animal, and unfamiliarity bred contempt. As happened again later in the worldâs history under the very different conditions of monastic life, the natural social intercourse between men and women was artificially hampered, and the inevitable crop of errors and perversions followed. But the monks, in their dislike of women, were at least ostensibly inspired by a strict code of sexual morality: a good deal of Ionian literature has for one of its objects a desire to defend the perverted sexual instinct which was the curse of ancient life. Of this sort are the stories of Ganymede, the young Asiatic, taken up to heaven by the ruler of the sky and displacing the maiden Hebe, and of Hylas, the minion of Heracles, whose beauty brought him to his death. Narcissus and Hyacinthus are persons of the same type, while the heroes of this kind of literature, Jason, Heracles, and Theseus, reserve all their finer chivalrous feelings for men, and regard women as a kind of booty, to be won, if possible, by fraud; if fraud is ineffective, by the judicious use of force. Jason deserts Medea in favour of a younger and richer woman. Heracles leaves his wife, to roam abroad, capturing by force any woman that pleases him. Theseus spends his life in betraying women, and in his old age marries PhÃ¦dra, the young sister of Ariadne. But their exploits do not at all detract from the heroic character of the three worthies, for it is now recognised that women are vile creatures who deserve vile treatment, and so we have a second class of tale invented to illustrate the innate viciousness of the female sex. There is the story of PasiphaÃ« and the Minotaur, Myrrha and Adonis, Leda and the swan, Europa and the bullâand so on, and so on. The same frame of mind that invented these tales ascribed to Sappho all kinds of unnatural vice, degraded Helen into a wanton, and Penelope into a shrew, and made it seem only logical that women, being the creatures they were, should be kept prisoners in a harem and confined to child-bearingâthat indispensable function being, indeed, the main reason for their being allowed to exist at all. The tales of PasiphaÃ«, Leda, and Europa, however, though useful enough in their way, are a little crude, and we have a more artistic method employed in the passages which about this time were incorporated into the Iliad by Ionian poets, with the idea of degrading the whole conception of the two divinities who represent womanly love, Hera and Aphrodite. Hera, the goddess of married life, the wife in her divine aspect, is represented by these decadents as an interfering termagant, spying upon her husband and seeking always to thwart him in the enjoyment of his legitimate lusts and caprices; Aphrodite, the goddess of unrestrained physical passion, becomes a calculating courtesan. The method pursued is that same kind of false realism which has supplied our comic stage with the well-worn themes of the old maid and the mother-in-law, and it need hardly be said that it harmonises very badly with the romantic splendour of the epic lays. The heroic hexameter gives for our ears an air of nobility even to this stuff, but in its essence it is colloquial style of a rather tawdry sort, and one or two passages will illustrate its character; for example, the last hundred lines of Book 1 of the Iliad, an episode altogether out of harmony with the rest of the book. Thetis has come to ask Zeus to avenge her son: Hera knows of her visit, and this is the language she uses to her husband: You crafty oneâyou know itâs true; who of the gods, pray, has been plotting with you again? You know that is what you like, to get away from me and to make up your mind without me, keeping your plans secret: never yet have you had the decency to tell me outright what you mean to do. Her husband, being a male, is far more reasonable in his tone: âYou must not expect to know all my business, my dear: it would be too hard for you, you know, though you are my wife,â and so on, gently putting her in her inferior place. But Hera refuses to listen to reason: âWhat do you mean by that?â she cries. âI have been only too ready in the past not to ask questions, I have left you at your ease, you have done what you liked,â and she proceeds to disclose her well-founded suspicions, until Zeus, giving up any further appeals to her better feelings, tells her bluntly to sit still and do what she is told. If not, âAll the gods in heaven, you know, wonât be of any use to you when I come close and lay my irresistible hands upon you.â A further edifying touch is given by the well-meant intervention of Heraâs lame son, Hephaestus, and the scene closes with the unquenchable laughter of the blessed gods. Another similar episode is the passage in Book 14, known as âthe beguiling of Zeus,â or, as we might say, âthe tricked husband.â Hera, it begins, saw her husband sitting on Mount Ida, and abhorred the sight of him. The story can be condensed by omitting all the ornamental epithets and turns of phrase which are used to give a very un-epic passage an epic colouring, and it runs somewhat like this. Though she detests her lord, she still has to consider how to get the better of him, and she decides to dress herself in her finest. She goes accordingly to her bower, with its close-shut doors and its secret key, fastens the bolt, and begins an elaborate toilet. It is a sure sign of the odalisque that perfumes, jewellery, adornment of every kind are lavished upon her by the very men who really regard her as a chattel, and the whole description that follows reads like a passage in the _Arabian Nights_, themselves probably a product of the same kind of Greek genius as composed these portions of the Iliad. Every detail is lovingly dwelt upon; first with âambrosiaâ (the author hardly troubles himself about what ambrosia really is, and uses it as a sort of trade word), she washes her lovely skin, and then she anoints herself with oil, an âextra-ambrosialâ sort, which has been specially perfumed for her: then she combs her hair and twists it into bright, beautiful, âambrosialâ curls. Next comes the âambrosialâ robe with dainty patterns upon it, pinned across the chest by golden brooches, and the corset belt with its hundred tassels, and finally the earrings shining brightly with their three pendants. The goddess is now ready, except for the last two articles of a Greek ladyâs toilette, the yashmak veil and the sandals, and as she is going abroad she puts them on and calls upon Aphrodite. Being a woman, she begins with a circumlocution. âDear child,â she says, âI wonder whether you will say yes or no to what I have to ask.â Aphrodite invites her to be a little more plain, and âthe craftyâ Hera then enters into an elaborate and entirely false explanation. She wants to borrow the magic cestus of Aphrodite in order to reconcile Oceanus and mother Tethys, a pair whose matrimonial affairs have been going so badly that they are now occupying separate rooms. âIf I could only get them together,â she says, âthey would ever afterwards call me their friend.â Whether Aphrodite believes the story or not is best left unsaid, but she at once consents: âIt is not possible or proper to refuse you, for you sleep in the arms of the mighty Zeus,â and she hands her the cestus with all its magic powersââin it are love and desire and sweet dalliance and alluring words, which rob even the wise of their witsââthen with mutual smiles they separate. All through the passage it will be noticed there is a good deal of talk about magic, the same sort of magic as we get in the _Arabian Nights_, but the effect of the cestus is really quite independent of any supernatural aid. It was an article such as may be seen to-day advertised in a fashion paperâa âsoutiengorgeââand it produced that development of the female bust and general appearance of embonpoint, which has always seemed to Eastern nations the ideal of feminine beauty. Binding the cestus then under her breast, Hera goes off to pay her next visit, to the god Sleep, whom she begs to send Zeus into a deep slumber. For this service she promises the god âa beautiful golden chair, something quite unbreakable, with a footstool attached.â But Sleep raises difficulties. He has tried a similar trick on Zeus before at the ladyâs request, and when the god awoke he was very violent, and Sleep would have been thrown out of heaven into the sea had not mother Night interfered to save him. In fine, a chair, even a golden chair, is not a sufficient reward for such a dangerous task. Hera accordingly raises her offer from a chair to a woman, and promises him one of the younger Graces as his bed-fellow. Sleep at this agrees to help, the pair go to Mount Ida, Sleep changes himself into a bird to watch the scene of beguiling, and Hera reveals herself to Zeus. As soon as the god sees her, he asks where she is going, and she repeats again the story of Oceanus and Tethysâ misadventures and her projected intervention. But the god tells her brusquely, like a real master of the harem, that he needs her presence and that she can go there another day: then, as a climax of good taste, he recites the long list of his mistresses, beginning with Ixionâs wife and ending with Leto. To this impassioned love-making, worthy of Don Juan himself, Hera, âthe crafty,â replies at first with an affectation of modesty, but the scene ends with the god in her arms: her purpose is accomplished and man once again is beguiled. Dr. Leaf finds the passage full of âhealthy sensuousness,â but to other readers it may well seem thoroughly unpleasant, both in its sentiment and its languageâfor example, the horrible reiteration of Î¤ÎÎ, âmon chÃ©ri,â at the end of Heraâs speech of invitation. Still, it is a valuable document. The brutal god and the crafty goddess are plainly the poetâs ideals of man and woman; and his ideals are very low. These two passages from the Iliad may serve as specimens of the second method of attack, that of sarcastic depreciation under the guise of realism, of which we have some further examples in Hesiod. The strange medley that now bears his name is in the same position as the Iliad. There is much ancient wisdom, in which woman has little part. âGet first a house, and then a woman, and then a ploughing ox,â and there are also many passages plainly inspired by the new Ionian spirit. The few facts that we know of Hesiodâs life would suggest that he was an Ionian poet who migrated to BÅotia, and incorporated into his verse the ancient lore of the country, much of it as old as anything we have in Greek literature. Hesiodâs father was a merchant who lived at Kyme, on the coast of Asia Minor. The son passed most of his life at Askra, but of his life we know little, of his death a good deal. He had a friend, a citizen of Miletus, who came to stay with him in Greece. The two Ionians travelling together were entertained by one Phegeus, a citizen of Locris. They repaid his hospitality by seducing his daughter: the girl committed suicide, and her brothers, taking the law into their own hands, avenged her ruin by killing both Hesiod and his friend, who indeed was said to have been the chief culprit. This tale, which is by far the best-authenticated fact in Hesiodâs life, does not give us a very pleasant impression as to the poetâs capacity for passing judgment on women, and probably the details of the Pandora myth are his own invention. The story itself is very old, but, as told by Hesiod, it has all the sham epic machinery, while it is linked on to the ancient fable of Prometheus. To revenge the gift of fire to men, Zeus resolves to make a woman. âI will give them an evil thing,â he says; âevery man in his heart will rejoice therein and hug his own misfortune.â Accordingly, Hephaestus mixes the paste and fashions the doll. Athena gives her skill in weaving, Aphrodite âsheds charm about her head and baleful desire and passion that eats away the strength of men.â Finally, Hermes gives her âa dogâs shameless mind and thieving ways.â Then the doll is dressed with kirtle and girdle, chains of gold are hung about her body, spring flowers put upon her head, and she is sent down to earth. âA sheer and hopeless delusion, to be the bane of men who work for their bread.â Epimetheus takes her to wife, and when he had got her, âthen and then only did he know the evil thing he possessed.â So the tale of Pandora ends, and the story of the Jar, although it comes next in the âWorks and Days,â is not certainly connected with her history. It is âa woman,â but not necessarily Pandora, who takes the lid from the Jar of Evil Things and lets them fly free over the world, so that only one curse now remains constant. That curse, it will be remembered, is Elpisânot so much Hope as the gamblerâs belief in Luck. It is the idea that things must change for the better if you will only risk all your fortune: that the laws of the universe will be providentially altered for your benefit; the belief, in fact, that so often makes the elderly misogynist take a young wife. Such is Hesiodâs attitude towards women, and with Hesiod the first stage of Greek literature comes to an end. III.âTHE LYRIC POETS Of the literature of the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, the lyric, iambic and elegiac poetry, we have only inconsiderable fragments. There are two reasons for the disappearance. In the case of the greatest names, AlcÃ¦us and Sappho, the Romans preferred the adaptations of Horace to the originals. With most of the other poets, the general standard of morality in their verse is so low that they fell under the ban of the Early Church, and as we knowâunreasonably enough in her caseâSappho was included with them, and her poems publicly burnt. But in the fragments that we do possess there appears unmistakably the same mixture of sensual desire and cynical distaste for women which disfigures the late Epic; until in this period it ends in sheer misogyny. In nothing is Aristotleâs great doctrine of the golden mean more valuable than in matters of sex. The sexual appetite is as natural as the appetites of eating and drinking; and as necessary for that which is natureâs sole concern, the preservation of the species. If the sexual appetite is wholly starved, the result is as disastrous to the race as the total deprivation of food and drink would be to the individual: if it is unduly fostered, Nature revenges herself in the same way as she does upon those who exceed in the matter of food or drink, and abnormal perversities of every kind begin. In sex matters the normal man and woman alone should be consideredâthe father and the mother of a familyâand their opinion alone is of any real value. But unfortunately in literature, and especially in this Ionian literature, the normal person is the exception, and most of the writers we now have to consider seem to have been unmarried and childless. The paucity of material, probably no great loss either in an artistic or a moral sense, has obscured the facts, but there seems little doubt that in this period literature was definitely used for the first time to degrade the position of women. The iambic metre was invented for the express purpose of satirical calumny, and the three chief iambic poets of the Alexandrian canon, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax, in their scanty fragments all agree on one point: the chief object of their lampoons isâwoman. At the beginning of this period the two sexes are fairly equal in their opportunities; at the end the female is plainly the inferior. Sappho and Erinna mark the turning-point in literature. Living at a time when it had not been made impossible for women to write, they showed that a woman could equal or surpass the male poets of her day. The few fragments of Erinnaâs verse that we possess, _e.g._, the epigram on the portrait of Agatharchis and the pathetic elegy on the dead Baucis, reveal a talent at least as fine and strong as that of AlcÃ¦us; while of all the Greek lyrists, Sappho, both in reputation and as far as we can judge in actual achievement, holds by far the highest place. Later ages, indeed, found it difficult to believe that Sappho was a woman at all. The scandal of male gossip was inspired by a genuine and pathetic belief that such a genius as hers must at least have been touched with masculine vices. But in Sapphoâs writings, which are our only real evidence, there is nothing distinctively âmannishâ: she is neither gross nor tedious. In the technique of her art, metrical skill, the music of verse, she is at least the equal of any poet who has lived since her day; in thought and diction she is far superior to all her contemporaries. In dealing with the Ionian poetry, exact dates are impossible, but the lyric age extends roughly from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the sixth century. The earliest writer in order of time, and in some ways the most important, is Archilochus, the Burns or Villon of Greeceâoutlaw, soldier of fortune, poet, the first man to introduce his own personal feelings into literature. Archilochus has his own special reasons for hating womenââArchilochum proprio rabies armavit iamboââand, as he says, he had learned the great lesson, âIf anyone hurts you, hurt her in return.â Betrothed to Cleobule, the daughter of a wealthy citizen of Paros, he found his marriage forbidden by the ladyâs father, Lycambes. The fatherâs reasons may be guessed, even from the few fragments of Archilochus that still remain. But the poet turned abruptly from amorist to misogynist, and spent the rest of his life in railing against his lost mistress and womankind in general. Both in love and war he is uncompromisingly frank. He tells us how he threw away his shield â_beside the bush in battle: but deuce take the shield, I will get another just as good, and at any rate I have escaped from death_.â His love poems are equally free-spoken. It is the actual image of his mistress that torments him when he cries, â_With myrtle boughs and roses fair she used to delight herself_â; and again, â_All her back and shoulders were covered by the shadow of her hair_.â But to his fierce spirit such love brings little comfort: â_Wretch that I am, like a dead man I lie, captive to desire, pierced with cruel anguish through all my bones_â; and, â_The longing that takes the strength from a manâs limbs, it is that which overcomes me now_.â Soon his love turns to hate and loathing, and he imputes to the woman the fault that is really his own: â_I was wronged, I have sinned. Aye! and many another man, methinks, will fall like me to ruin_.â His mistress now for him has lost her beauty. _âNo longer does your soft flesh bloom fair; even as dry leaves it begins to wither.â_ Like all women, she is false and full of guile: â_In one hand she carries water, in the other the fire of craft_.â To marry a woman now is, â_To take to oneâs house manifest ruin_.â The folly of men and the falsity of women seem to have been the themes of the animal stories which Archilochus, like Ãsop, composed. Woman is the fox; man is now the eagle, now the ape; but the fragments are too short for a certain judgment. What remains, indeed, of Archilochus is always tantalising in its incompleteness. Of his epigrams, for example, only three are left; here is a free translation of one of them: âMiss High-and-mighty, as soon as she became a wedded wife, kicked her bonnet over the moon.â Fortunately, however, we have preserved for us in Herodotus a much longer specimen of Archilochusâ mannerâa real Milesian tale, the story of Gyges and Candaules. The tale is handed down to us in Herodotusâ prose, and it is impossible to disentangle the shares contributed by the Ionian poet and the Ionian historian; nor is it necessary; the story is typical of both. Candaules makes the initial mistake of being enamoured of his own wife, and the second mistake of not believing Gyges when he is enlightened on the subject of female modesty. His folly naturally brings him to a bad end. The story is interesting, but it is especially significant when we compare it with the tale of the same Gyges as told by Plato. There the sensual elements disappear, the interest centres in the magic ring, and the seduction of the queen and murder of the king form merely the hasty conclusion of the narrative. The difference between the two stories is the measure of the difference between the feminist philosopher and the libertine turned woman-hater. But Archilochus at least has once loved a woman. Our next poet, Simonides of Amorgos, seems to have been a misogynist from birth. His work now only exists in fragments, but it is so significant of a frame of mind that the two longest passages that survive deserve a verbatim translation. The first runs thus: Women, they are the greatest evil that God ever created. Even if they do appear to be useful at times, they usually turn out a curse to their owners. A man who lives with a wife never gets through a whole day without trouble, and it is no easy matter for him to drive away from his house that fiend abhorred, the foul fiend, Hunger. Moreover, just when a man is thinking to be merry at homeâby Godâs grace or manâs serviceâthe woman always finds some ground of fault and puts on her armour for battle. Where there is a wife, you can never entertain a guest without fear of trouble. Again, the woman who seems to be most virtuous, mind you, may well be the most mischievous of all. Her husband gapes at her in admiration, but his neighbours laugh to see him, and the mistake he is making. Every one will praise his own wifeâmen are shrewd enough for thatâand then will talk scandal about his neighbourâs, and all the time we do not realise that we are all in the same plight, for, as we said before, this is the greatest evil that God ever created. The other fragment, the catalogue of women, is longer and better known. It begins: From the first God made womenâs characters different. Into one kind of woman He put the mind of a pig, lank and bristly, and in her house everything lies about in disorder, bedraggled with mud and rolling on the floor, while she herself, unwashed, in dirty clothes sits in the mire and waxes fat. The second woman God made out of a mischievous fox. She is cunning in all things alike; she knows everything, all that is bad and all that is good; often her speech is fair, but often it is evil, and her mood changes every day. The third sort of woman was made out of a dog, and she is the true child of her mother, ever restless. She wants to hear and know about everything; she is always peering about and roaming around, growling even though there is no one in sight. A man cannot stop her with threats; no, not even if in sudden anger he break her teeth with a stone. Soft talk is useless, too; it is all the same even if she happen to be sitting among strangers: a man finds her a continual and hopeless nuisance. The fourth woman the gods in heaven made out of mudâor rather they half made herâand then gave her to man. Such a one knows nothing, good or bad; the only business she has sense enough for is eating. Even if God sends a bitter winterâs day and she be shivering, she never will draw her chair closer to the fire. The fifth woman was made out of the sea, and she has two minds within her. One day she is all smiles and gladness. A stranger seeing her in the house will praise her. âIn all the world,â says he, âthere is not a better or a fairer lady.â But another day she is insupportable to look at or to approach. She is filled with fury, like a bitch guarding her cubs: savage to all alike, friends and foes, detestable. Even so the sea often stands quiet and harmless, a joy to sailors in the summer tide, and often again is driven to madness by the thunderous waves. It is to the sea that such a woman is most like. The sixth woman was made from an ass, grey of hide and stubborn against blows. Though you use reproaches and force, it is with difficulty you get her to give way to you and do her work satisfactorily. She is always eating, day and night; she eats in her bedroom, she eats by the fireside. But if a man approaches to make love to her, she comes forward quickly enough to welcome him. The seventh was made out of a polecat, a plaguy and a grievous kind. There is nothing fair or lovable in her, nothing pleasant, nothing charming, and any man who comes near she fills with nausea. She is a thief and annoys her neighbours, and often she gobbles up the sacrifice herself without offering any to the gods. The eighth woman was the daughter of a mare, stepping daintily with flowing mane. She shudders at the thought of any servantâs work or labour. She will never lay her hand to the millstone, nor lift up the sieve, nor throw the dung out of doors: she wonât even sit near the kitchen stove, because she is afraid of the soot, and she makes her husband well acquainted with adversity. Every day, two or three times, she washes every speck of dirt off her, and anoints herself with unguents. Her hair is always luxuriant and well combed, with garlands of flowers upon it. Of course, such a woman is a fine sight for the men to see, but she is a curse to her owner, unless indeed he be a tyrant or sceptred king who has a fancy to pride himself on such delights. The ninth woman came from a monkey: this sort is, indeed, pre-eminently the very greatest curse that God ever sent to men. Her features are shamefully ugly; such a woman, as she walks through a town, is a mockery to all men. She has a short neck, and moves with difficulty; she has no buttocks, her legs are all bone. Alas for the poor wretch who holds such an evil thing in his arms! But as for guile and tricks, she knows them all, and like a monkey she does not mind being laughed at. She never renders anyone a service, but all day long this is what she is seeking and looking forâhow to do some one as much harm as she can. The tenth woman was made out of a bee: happy the man who gets her! On her alone no breath of scandal lights, but she brings a life of happiness and prosperity. Husband and wife grow old together in love, and fair and glorious are her children. Famous among all women is she, and a grace divine encompasses her about. She
{'title': 'Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle by F. A. Wright', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}