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_ Both Diana and Venus were brought to Greece from Asia. Indeed, when we examine Greek life in the light of comparative _Culturgeschichte_, we find a surprising prevalence of Oriental customs and ideas, especially in Athens, and particularly in the treatment of women. In this respect Athens is the antipode of Sparta. While at Sparta the women wrestled naked with the men, in Athens the women were not even permitted to witness their games. The Athenians moreover had very decided opinions about the effect of Spartan customs. The beautiful Helen who caused the Trojan war by her adulterous elopement was a Spartan, and the Athenian Euripides makes Peleus taunt her husband Menelaus in these words:
"Thou who didst let a Phrygian rob thee of thy wife, leaving thy home without bolt or guard, as if forsooth the cursed woman thou hadst was a model of virtue. No! a Spartan maid could not be chaste, e'en if she would, who leaves her home and bares her limbs and lets her robe float free, to share with youth their races and their sports--customs I cannot away with. Is it any wonder that ye fail to educate your women in virtue?"
The Athenian, to be sure, did not any more than the Spartan educate his women in virtue. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]
[FOOTNOTE 312: Compare Menander, _Frag. Incert._, 154: [Greek: gunaich ho didaskon gpammat ou kalos poiei]
Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the Spartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. The girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III., 337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged." _
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