eft in charge of affairs
at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and
sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African
Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands
too.

And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the
Amazon--a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate
man--has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and
progress!

"If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were
taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not
your inferiors," exclaims Peleus in the _Andromache_ of Euripides,
thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta. There was, however, one
other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her. C.O. Mueller
alludes to it in the following (II., 304):

"Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they
involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as
Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of
Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of
Agis."

This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all
other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be
compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and
courage to participate in this masculine virtue. Aristotle appears to
have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that
"each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"
yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more
than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste
housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to
man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have
liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to the
end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of
Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On
the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues
of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of
heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.

Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.
Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latin
names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are
Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,
as Gladstone