for physical labour on the part of the dominant womanhood; immured within
the walls of their houses as wives or mistresses, waited on by slaves and
dependents, they no longer sustained by their exertion either their own
life or the life of their people. The males absorbed the intellectual
labours of life; slaves and dependents the physical. For a moment, at the
end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood of
Greece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliant
intellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous colours in
the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking; but the heart of Greece was
already rotting and her vigour failing. Increasingly, division and
dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male advanced in
culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil while the female
sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life, and thus was made
ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not bridge. The abnormal
institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane
was one, and the most serious result, of this severance. The inevitable
and invincible desire of all highly developed human natures, to blend with
their sexual relationships their highest intellectual interests and
sympathies, could find no satisfaction or response in the relationship
between the immured, comparatively ignorant and helpless females of the
upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant, cultured, and many-sided males
who formed its dominant class in the fifth and fourth centuries. Man
turned towards man; and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting human
life, was severed from the loftiest and profoundest phases of human
emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable little life
between the walls of her house, and Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing
philosophy and morals with Alcibiades; and the race decayed at its core.
(See Jowett's translation of Plato's "Banquet"; but for full light on this
important question the entire literature of Greece in the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C. should be studied.) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier