Legal Position of Women in Ancient Greece.
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LEGAL POSITION OF WOMEN IN ANCIENT GREECE. By R. Vashon Rogers. "And when a lady's in the case You know all other things give place." THE comedians of Athens thought no abuse of woman too bitter or too coarse; and even in the solemn tragedies we are told such things as that " one man is better than ten thousand women." Aris totle, the philosopher par exeellenee, speaks of the female sex as by nature worse than the male, and Plato says it is far harder for women than for men to attain to virtue. A satiric poet gives it as his opinion that a man has only two very pleasant days with his wife, the one when he marries her, the other when he buries her. A comic poet remarks pithily, "woman is the immortal, necessary evil." Euripides says, " Terrible is the force of the waves of the sea; terrible is the rush of a river and blast of hot fire; terrible is poverty, and terrible are a thousand other things; but none is such a terrible evil as is woman." Yet strange to say all these obiter dieta can be matched by others from the same authors praising woman to the skies. Hence we close a study of women, doubting. The trouble is that almost all we know of women is told by men, and men rarely write dispas sionately of women; not only is it told by men, but it is told by men for men. In Athens the power of a father over a newly-born child was little limited by law. An infant that he did not wish to bring up might be exposed, or even killed. Daughters were often exposed, but fortunately, the ex posure was generally so arranged that the sorrowing parent might be consoled with the idea that the infant would not perish, but be found by some tender-hearted being who would adopt it and bring it up. Before the days of Solon a father could pawn or sell his children, but the laws of that legis lator forbade such things, except in the
case of unmarried daughters who had been led astray from the paths of virtue and se duced. If a father hired out his child for immoral purposes he not only lost all claim upon her for assistance in his old age, but was also liable to punishment. The law compelled every father to see that his sons were educated in music and gymnastics (music included everything that pertained to the culture of the intellect and the emotions; gymnastics all belonging to the training of the body). The education and culture of girls, however, was left merely to custom and tradition, and was solely a matter of the household and family, and was in no wise regulated by legal provisions. A girls' school did not exist; they were taught at home by their mothers and women servants. The life of the daughters was con fined almost entirely to their homes and to domestic intercourse with their friends and relatives. Some writers have spoken of the unfor tunate class called Hetairae as if they, with education and accomplishments, occupied the place held in modern days by the leaders of feminine society. This was not so, for with the exception of one or two remarkable women, the accomplishments of the Hetairae very seldom went beyond flute-playing and witty, though too often coarse, repartee. Their houses were constant scenes of de bauchery; when they appeared abroad they were treated with contumely and were the objects of coarse jests and jokes, and usually, with them, life ended in misery and squalor. Sometimes they were slaves. In the historic days of Greece the women of Athens were the most secluded, those of Sparta the least. In Athens unmarried girls were scarcely allowed to leave the gynaeceum except when a religious festival occurred. If
