Woman and the Republic | Page 4

the burgesses were compelled to impose a threefold punishment upon their wives--they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the goddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men were its manifestation.
The legend is generally taken to indicate the time when the Greek gens progressed to the family. In the ruder time, the legitimacy of the chieftain might be traced, because the mother, though not always the father, could be known with certainty. When the father became the acknowledged head of the household, a distinct advance was made toward that heroic age in which the vague but towering figures of men and women move across the stage. Goddesses, queens, princesses, are powerful in love and war. Sibyls unfold the meaning of the book of fate. Vestals feed the fires upon the highest and lowest altars. Later, throughout most of the states of Greece, something like the following order of political life is seen: from kings to oligarchs, from oligarchs to tyrants or despots, from them to some form of restricted constitutional liberty. In Sparta, all change of government was controlled by the machinery of war, and the soldiers were made forever free. Athens, separated from the rest of Greece, was less agitated by outward conflict. In government she passed from king to archon; from hereditary archon to archons chosen for ten years, but always from one family, then to those elected for one year, nine being chosen. At the time of the Areopagus there were four classes of citizens. The first three paid taxes, had a right to share in the government, and formed the defence of the state. If women were of political importance in earlier times, and if a republic is more favorable to the exercise by them of the elective franchise, we should expect to find women reaching their highest power under the Areopagus. Exactly the contrary appears to be true. Native and honorable Greek women retired to domestic life as the liberty of their people grew. Grote, in his "History of Greece," referring to the legendary period, says: "We find the wife occupying a station of great dignity and influence, though it was the practice of the husband to purchase her by valuable presents to her parents. She even seems to live less secluded, and to enjoy a wider sphere of action, than was allotted to her in historic Greece."
Lecky, in his "European Morals," says: "It is one of the most remarkable and, to some writers, one of the most perplexing facts in the moral history of Greece, that in the former and ruder period women had undoubtedly the highest place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection." What the "highest perfection" is, for her type, or for man's type, is not here under discussion; but it is not out of place to say in passing that if the final conquest of the spiritual over the material forces of humanity is really the aim of civilization, these "facts in the moral history of Greece" become less "perplexing."
The heroines of Homer's tales were all of noble birth--they were goddesses, princesses, hereditary gentlewomen. In early historic times, also, it was only royal or gentle blood that secured for woman political power. Athena was, in gentle Athens, patroness of household arts; but in Sparta, as Minerva, the same divinity was goddess, not of political interests, as Mrs. Dietrick puts it, but of war. She sprang full-armed from the head of Jove--rather a masculine origin, it must be owned. In Sparta women became soldiers as the democratic idea advanced. Princess Archidamia, marching at the head of her female troop to rebuke the senators for the decree that the women and children be removed from the city before the anticipated attack could come, is an example. In Etolia, in Argos, and in other states, the same was true. Maria and Telesilla led the women in battle and disciplined them in peace. But the world does not turn to Sparta for its ideal of a pre-Christian republic, and the Suffragists of our day do not propose to emulate the Spartan Amazon and hew their way to political power with the sword.
In Athens, which does present the model, matters were far otherwise. In the year 700 B. C., the Spartans called upon Athens for a commander to lead them to the second Messenian war, and the Athenians sent them Tyrtaeus, their martial poet. The Spartans were displeased at his youth and gentle bearing; but when the battle was joined, his chanting of his own war-songs so animated the troops that they won against heavy odds. The following is a