"The condition of women is worse than that of all human beings. If
man is favored by fortune, he becomes a ruler, and wins fame on the
battlefield; and if the gods have ordained him his fortune, he is
the first to die a fair death among his people. But the joys of
woman are narrowly compassed: she is given unasked, in marriage, by
others, often to strangers; and when she is dragged away by the
victor through the smoking ruins, there is none to rescue her."

Thucydides, who had already expressed the opinion quoted by many a
modern Philistine,--"The wife who deserves the highest praise is she of
whom one hears neither good nor evil outside her own house,"--anticipates
a later verdict, in words that might have been the foundation of
Iphigenia's lament:--

"Woman is more evil than the storm-tossed waves, than the heat of
fire, than the fall of the wild cataract! If it was a god who
created woman, wherever he may be, let him know that he is the
unhappy author of the greatest ills."

This was a summary of the Greek view as a whole. Sparta trained her
girls and boys alike in childhood; but the theories of Lycurgus,
admirable at some points, were brutal and short-sighted at others, and
Sparta demonstrated that the extinction of all desire for beauty or ease
or culture brings with it as disastrous results as its extreme opposite.

It is Athens that sums up the highest product of Greek thought, and that
represents a civilization which from the purely intellectual side has
had no successor. Yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and
indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage