The Greek View of Life Part 11

"The two boys laughed.

"'I shall not ask which is the richer,' I said; 'for you two are friends, are you not?'

"'Certainly,' they replied.

"'And friends have all things in common, so that one of you can be no richer than the other, if you say truly that you are friends.'

"They a.s.sented. I was about to ask which was the greater of the two, and which was the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was called away by some one who came and said that the gymnastic-master wanted him.

I supposed that he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away and I asked Lysis some more questions." [Footnote: Plato, Lysis 206 e.--Translated by Jowett]

Such were the scenes in which Socrates pa.s.sed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the Athenian people. To p.r.i.c.k intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs--justice expediency, honesty, and the like--such was the constant object of his life. That he should have made enemies, that he should have been misunderstood, that he should have been accused of undermining the foundations of morality and religion, is natural and intelligible enough; and it was on these grounds that he was condemned to death. His conduct at his trial was of a piece with the rest of his life. The customary arts of the pleader, the appeal to the sympathies of the public, the introduction into court of weeping wife and children, he rejected as unworthy of himself and of his cause. His defence was a simple exposition of the character and the aims of his life; so far from being a criminal he a.s.serted that he was a benefactor of the Athenian people; and having, after his condemnation, to suggest the sentence he thought appropriate, he proposed that he should be supported at the public expense as one who had deserved well of his country. After his sentence to death, having to wait thirty days for its execution, he showed no change from his customary cheerfulness, pa.s.sing his time in conversation with his friends. So far from regretting his fate he rather congratulated himself that he would escape the decadence that attends upon old age; and he had, if we may trust Plato, a fair and confident a.s.surance that a happy life awaited him beyond. He died, according to the merciful law of Athens, by drinking hemlock; "the wisest and justest and best," in Plato's judgment, "of all the men that I have ever known."

We have dwelt thus long on the personality of Socrates, familiar though it be, not only on account of its intrinsic interest, but also because it is peculiarly h.e.l.lenic. That sunny and frank intelligence, bathed, as it were, in the open air, a gracious blossom springing from the root of physical health, that unique and perfect balance of body and soul, pa.s.sion and intellect, represent, against the brilliant setting of Athenian life, the highest achievement of the civilisation of Greece.

The figure of Socrates, no doubt, has been idealised by Plato, but it is none the less significant of the trend of h.e.l.lenic life. No other people could have conceived such an ideal; no other could have gone so far towards its realisation.

Section 8. The Greek View of Woman.

In the preceding account we have attempted to give some conception of the Greek ideal for the individual man. It is now time to remind ourselves that that ideal was only supposed to be proper to a small cla.s.s--the cla.s.s of soldier-citizens. Artisans and slaves, as we have seen, had no partic.i.p.ation in it; neither, and that is our next point, had women.

Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the h.e.l.lenic 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 ill.u.s.trated by the inst.i.tutions of such a State as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was specially trained for maternity, and connections outside the marriage tie were sanctioned by custom and opinion, if they were such as were likely to lead to healthy offspring. Further it 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 connection 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 a.s.sociate, 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 a.s.signed 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 disabilities. 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 reappears 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 the marriage relation is a matter of private concern, and 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 recognised 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, connection and the like, and without any regard for the inclination of the parties concerned. And an interesting pa.s.sage in Xenophon indicates a point of view quite consonant with this accepted practice. G.o.d, he says, ordained the inst.i.tution 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 woman 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 woman 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 rapine 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." [Footnote: Odyss. xxiii. 205, 231.--Translated by Butcher and Lang.]

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 antic.i.p.ation of the future nothing is so bitter as the fate he fears for his wife. "Yet doth the conquest of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neither Hekabe's own, neither King Priam's, neither my brethren's, the many and brave that shall fall in the dust before their foemen, as doth thine anguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead thee weeping and rob thee of the light of freedom.... But me in death may the heaped- up earth be covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying into captivity." [Footnote: Iliad vi. 450.--Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers.]

But most striking of all the portraits of women to be found in Homer, and most typical of a frank and healthy relation between the s.e.xes, is the account of Nausicaa given in the Odyssey. Ulysses, shipwrecked and naked, battered and covered with brine, surprises Nausicaa and her maidens as they are playing at ball on the sh.o.r.e. The attendants run away, but Nausicaa remains to hear what the stranger has to say. He asks her for shelter and clothing; and she grants the request with an exquisite courtesy and a freedom from all embarra.s.sment which becomes only the more marked and the more delightful when, as she sees him emerge from the bath, clothed and beautiful, she cannot restrain the exclamation "would that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it might please him here to abide." [Footnote: Od. vi.

244.--Translated by Butcher and Lang.] About the whole scene there is a freshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuries sicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour of the dawn.

If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of the Greeks, we might conclude, from such pa.s.sages as these, that they had a conception of woman and of her relation to man, finer and n.o.bler, in some respects, than that of modern times. But in fact the Homeric poems represent a civilisation which had pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x. 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 recognised in her no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his children. Romance and the higher companionship 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 ill.u.s.trations might be adduced from the writers of the fifth and fourth centuries. Plato, for example, cla.s.ses together "children, women, and servants," [Footnote: Plato, Republic 431 c.] and states generally that there is no branch of human industry in which the female s.e.x is not inferior to the male. [Footnote: Ibid. 455 c.] Similarly, Aristotle insists again and again on the natural inferiority of woman, and ill.u.s.trates 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."

[Footnote: Arist. Pol. III. 1277 b 21.--Translated by Welldon.] But the most striking example, perhaps, because the most unconscious, of this habitual way of regarding women is to be found in the funeral oration put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles, where the speaker, after suggesting what consolation he can to the fathers of the slain, turns to the women with the brief but significant exhortation: "If I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her s.e.x is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men." [Footnote: Thucydides ii.

45.--Translated by Jowett.]

The sentiments of the poets are less admissible as evidence. But some of them are so extreme that they may be adduced as a further indication of a point of view whose prevalence alone could render them even dramatically plausible. Such for example is the remark which Euripides puts into the mouth of his Medea--"women are impotent for good, but clever contrivers of all evil" [Footnote: Euripides, Medea. 406.]; or that of one of the characters of Menander, "a woman is necessarily an evil, and he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest form." While the general Greek view of the dependence of woman on man is well expressed in the words of Aethra, in the "Suppliants" of Euripides--"it is proper for women who are wise to let men act for them in everything."

[Footnote: Euripides, Hik. 40.]

In accordance with this conception of the inferiority of the female s.e.x, 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 recognised 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 s.e.xes:--"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." We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the symbol of woman is the tortoise; and in the following burlesque pa.s.sage from Aristophanes we shall recognise, in spite of the touch of caricature, the genuine features of the Greek wife. Praxagora is recounting the merits and services of women:

"They dip their wool in hot water according to the ancient plan, all of them without exception, and never make the slightest innovation. They sit and cook, as of old. They carry upon their heads, as of old. They conduct the Themophoriae, as of old. They wear out their husbands, as of old. They buy sweets, as of old. They take their wine neat, as of old."

[Footnote: Aristophanes, Eccles. 215.]

And that this was also the kind of ideal approved by their lords and masters, and that any attempt to pa.s.s beyond it was resented, is amusingly ill.u.s.trated in the following extract from the same poet, where Lysistrata explains the growing indignation of the women at the bad conduct of affairs by the men, and the way in which their attempts to interfere were resented. The comments of the "magistrate" typify, of course, the man's point of view.

"Think of our old moderation and gentleness, think how we bore with your pranks, and were still, All through the days of your former prognacity, all through the war that is over and spent: Not that (be sure) we approved of your policy; never our griefs you allowed us to vent.

Well we perceived your mistakes and mismanagement. Often at home on our housekeeping cares, Often we heard of some foolish proposal you made for conducting the public affairs.

Then would we question you mildly and pleasantly, inwardly grieving, but outwardly gay; 'Husband, how goes it abroad?' we would ask of him; 'what have ye done in a.s.sembly to-day?'

'What would ye write on the side of the Treaty-stone?' Husband says angrily, 'What's that to you?

You hold your tongue!' And I held it accordingly.

STRATYLLIS.

That is a thing which I never would do!

MAGISTRATE.

Ma'am, if you hadn't you'd soon have repented it.

LYSISTRATA.

Therefore I held it, and spake not a word.

Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse than the former we heard.

'Husband,' I say, with a tender solicitude, 'Why have you pa.s.sed such a foolish decree?'

Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, 'Stick to your spinning, my mistress,' says he, 'Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is the care and the business of men!'

MAGISTRATE.

Zeus! 'twas a worthy reply, and an excellent!

LYSISTRATA.

What! you unfortunate, shall we not then, Then, when we see you perplexed and incompetent, shall we not tender advice to the state!"

[Footnote: Aristoph. Lysistrata. 507.--Translated by B. B.

Rogers.]

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, with whom we have already made acquaintance, 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 perform 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.--In Xenophon's view, in fact, the inferiority of the woman almost disappears; and the sentiment approximates closely to that of Tennyson--

"either s.e.x alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils Defect in each."

Such a conception, however, of the "complementary" relation of woman to man, does not exclude a conviction of her essential inferiority. And this conviction, it can hardly be disputed, was a cardinal point in the Greek view of life.

Section 9. Protests against the Common View of Woman.

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 s.e.xes 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 s.e.xes 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." [Footnote: Plato, Rep, 455 d.--Translated by Davies and Vaughan.]

In adopting this att.i.tude Plato stands alone not only among 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 doc.u.ments of the dumb and age-long protest of the weaker against the stronger s.e.x. In ill.u.s.tration 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." [Footnote: Euripides, Med. 230.]