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_ 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. Mueller 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.
[FOOTNOTE 310: See the evidence cited in Becker (III., 315) regarding Aristotle's views as to the inferiority of women. After comparing it with the remarks of other writers Becker sums up the matter by saying that "the virtue of which a woman was in those days considered capable did not differ very much from that of a faithful slave."]
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]
[FOOTNOTE 311: In the _Odyssey_ (XV., 418) Homer speaks of "a Phoenician woman, handsome and tall." He makes Odysseus compare Nausicaea to Diana "in beauty, height, and bearing," and in another place he declares that, like Diana among her nymphs, she o'ertops her companions by head and brow (VI., 152, 102). However, this manner of measuring beauty with a yard-stick; indicates _some_ progress over the savage and Oriental custom of making rotundity the criterion of beauty.] _
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