still a Sappho, burst through the confining bonds of woman's environment,
and with the force of irresistible genius broke triumphantly into new
fields of action and powerful mental activity, standing side by side with
the male; but their cases were exceptional. Had they, or such as they,
been able to tread down a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women
might have followed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of
the dominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise from
their condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken their
share in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race,
Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourth
century, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls in at
the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip, and
then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlike son, who
was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitable Olympia. (Like
almost all men remarkable for either good or evil, Alexander inherited from
his mother his most notable qualities--his courage, his intellectual
activity, and an ambition indifferent to any means that made for his own
end. Fearless in her life, she fearlessly met death "with a courage worthy
of her rank and domineering character, when her hour of retribution came";
and Alexander is incomprehensible till we recognise him as rising from the
womb of Olympia.) Nor could she have been swept clean, a few hundred years
later, from Thessaly to Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples
destroyed, her effete women captured by the hordes of the Goths--a people
less skilfully armed and less civilised than the descendants of the race of
Pericles and Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk
whose monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless,
labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the
ends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men.

In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured