Of all civilizations that of Greece was the most delightful. Beauty was the object of its idolatry, happiness sagaciously pursued its highest aim. Men lived blithely the days that were allotted, and lay down calmly to their final sleep. Their ideal was serenity, serene beauty, serene strength, serene wisdom. They were born idealists. They sought ever the highest types through the infinite mutations of individual imperfection. They studied the soul of humanity, seeking to evolve the perfect man and the perfect woman, not the particular soul, with its weakness and its strength, its greatness and its folly, as Shakespeare presents it. They conceived of the gods as only men and women, stronger, wiser, more beautiful than mankind, and dowered with eternal youth; but lifted so little above humanity that mortals might aspire to resemble them; and it was the god-like man, the godlike woman, whom they rejoiced to portray with brush and chisel, of whom they sang in songs that will resound through all the ages.

But in this incomparable civilization woman had little part. In Athens and Ionia wives and daughters were shut up in the gynæceum almost as closely as the women of the East are secluded in the harem. In an age when books were few, when education was imparted by listening to the traveller who told his tales in the market-place, to the orator who spoke in the public assemblies, to the poet who recited his verses or the philosopher who discoursed in the streets and porticoes, the women, immured

in their houses, were necessarily condemned to ignorance. Cut off from all intercourse with intelligent men, expected to be mere household ornaments or drudges, it is not surprising that they became the idle gossips whom Aristophanes delights to satirize. Having deprived them of every means of self-improvement, men scorned them and ridiculed their want of cultivation. It is true that a few of the hetairai, like Sappho and Aspasia, were women of marvelous genius and exquisite culture; but having burst through the bounds of womanly decorum, they could not demand respect, and in their refinement and intelligence they were rare exceptions in a degraded class.

Upon Greek civilization women therefore exercised almost no influence. Those who were respected were too ignorant and childish; those who had more information could command no esteem. It is true that at Sparta boys and girls received the same education; but that education was little more than physical training; and Sparta, far from contributing to the progress of Greek culture, excluded it from her borders as completely as she could. The civilization of Greece was almost purely masculine. Sappho was a poetess of unequalled splendor and Corinna was esteemed a worthy rival of Pindar, so gorgeous in his imagery, so magnificent in his diction; but they were isolated examples. The influence of woman is not exerted in such superb exceptions; it is a constant force that should be felt at every fireside and through every day; holding up before the eyes of men a living model of refinement, of purity, of gentleness, of humanity. That influence was lacking to the Greeks in their palmy days.

In more distant ages woman had occupied a much loftier position. Homer depicts to us a society in which men and women are substantially equal, where they sit together at the same banquets and mingle in the same conversations. And of all women that have been pictured in prose or verse, those of Homer are the most perfect. The whole domain of literature furnishes us no example of a woman so sweet, so strong, so tender as Andromache, Hector's matchless spouse. As the Venus of Praxiteles was the most perfect female type that the artist ever executed, so Andromache stands supreme among the