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.

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]

ATHENIAN ORIENTALISM

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: