idols of purity and chastity are set up for worship.

The fact that Greek poets and philosophers speak so often of an ideal
relationship between the wife and the husband proves how greatly the
failure of the accepted marriage was understood and depreciated by the
noblest of the Athenians. The bonds of the patriarchal system must
always tend to break down as civilisation advances, and men come to
think and to understand the real needs and dependence of the sexes
upon each other. Aristotle says that marriage besides the propagation
of the human race, has another aim, namely, "community of the entire
life." He describes marriage as "a species of friendship," one,
moreover, which "is most in accordance with Nature, as husband and
wife mutually supply what is lacking in the other." Here is the ideal
marriage, the relationship between one woman and the one man that
to-day we are striving to attain. To gain it the wife must become the
free companion of her husband.

It is Euripides who voices the sorrows of women. He also foreshadows
their coming triumph.

"Back streams the waves of the ever running river,
Life, life is changed and the laws of it o'ertrod.
* * * * * * *
And woman, yea, woman shall be terrible in story;
The tales too meseemeth shall be other than of yore;
For a fear there is that cometh out of woman and a glory,
And the hard hating voices shall encompass her no more."[290]

IV.--_In Rome_

"The character of a people is only an eternal becoming.... They
are born and are modified under the influence of innumerable
causes."--JEAN FINOT.

Of the position of women in Rome in the pre-historic period we know
almost nothing. We can accept that there was once a period of
mother-rule.[291] Very little evidence, however, is forthcoming;
still, what does exist points clearly to the view that woman's actions
in the earliest times were entirely unfettered. Probably we may accept
as near to reality the picture Virgil gives to us of Camilla fighting
and dying on the field of battle.

In the ancient necropolis of Belmonte, dating from the iron age,
Professor d'Allosso has recently discovered two very rich tombs of
women warriors with war chariots over their remains. "The importance
of this discovery is exceptional, as it shows that the existence of
the Amazon heroines, leaders of armies, sung by the ancient poets, is
not a poetic fiction, but an h