Yet the same city, as I have said, leaned on the worship of Vesta, the
Preserver, and in later times was devoted to that of Isis. In Sparta,
thought, in this respect as in all others, was expressed in the
characters of real life, and the women of Sparta were as much Spartans
as the men. The "citoyen, citoyenne" of France was here actualized.
Was not the calm equality they enjoyed as honorable as the devotion of
chivalry? They intelligently shared the ideal life of their nation.

Like the men they felt:

"Honor gone, all's gone:
Better never have been born."


They were the true friends of men. The Spartan, surely, would not
think that he received only his body from his mother. The sage, had he
lived in that community, could not have thought the souls of "vain and
foppish men will be degraded after death to the forms of women; and,
if they do not then make great efforts to retrieve themselves, will
become birds."

(By the way, it is very expressive of the hard intellectuality of the
merely _mannish_ mind, to speak thus of birds, chosen always by
the _feminine_ poet as the symbols of his fairest thoughts.)

We are told of the Greek nations in general, that Woman occupied there
an infinitely lower place than Man. It is difficult to believe this,
when we see such range and dignity of thought on the subject in the
mythologies, and find the poets producing such ideals as Cassandra,
Iphigenia, Antigone, Macaria; where Sibylline priestesses told the