flourished. Homer gives an accurate portrayal of the Heroic Age, on the
borderland of which his own life was passed, while memories of it were
still fresh in the minds of men. The Athenian tragedians also locate
their plots in the Heroic Age, but they endow their characters with a
depth of thought, with a power of reflection, with an insight into the
problems of life, which were altogether foreign to men and women in the
childhood of the world, and were characteristic of Athens in its
brilliant intellectual epoch. Hence a history of Greek womanhood must
draw largely from the works of the poets, and must endeavor to give a
picture of the women who figure in the Iliad and the Odyssey and in the
dramas of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The lyric poets of Greece
are also of unique importance in the study of ancient humanity, for they
reveal the hearts of men and women and make known the conflicts of the
soul. The historical women of Hellas are few in number, and are known to
us only through meagre passages in the historians, orators, and
philosophers.

A third source of information is Greek art. When woman figures so
largely in the few relics of antiquity which have come down to us
intact, what a commentary on ancient womanhood must the art of the
Greeks have been, before the ruthless hands of Romans and barbarians and
the tooth of time effaced her most precious treasures! The vase
paintings of the Greeks illustrate every phase of private life, and
abound in representations of the maiden and the matron, in the home, at
the loom, in the bridal procession, at the wedding. And Greek sculpture
presents ideal types of woman, perfect physically and highly endowed
with every intellectual and sensuous charm. From these works of plastic
art, abounding in the museums of Europe, we know that the Greek woman
was beautiful, the peer of man in physical excellence. In form, the
Greek woman was so perfect as to be still taken as the type of her sex.
"Her beauty, from whatever cause, bordered closely upon the ideal, or
rather was that which, because now only found in works of art, we call
the ideal. But our conceptions of form never transcend what is found in
nature. She bounds our ideas by a circle over which we cannot step. The
sculptors of Greece represented nothing but what they saw; and even when
the cunning of their hand was most felicitous, even when love and grace
and all the poetry of womanhood appeared to breathe from their m