. What he did was to compel them to be virtuous by
locking them up in the Oriental style. Unlike the Spartan, the
Athenian had a regard for paternity and genealogy, and the only way he
knew to insure it was the Asiatic. He failed to make the discovery
that the best safeguard of woman's virtue is education--as witness
America; and to this failure is due to a large extent the collapse of
Greek civilization. Athenian women were more chaste than Spartans
because they had to be, and they were superior also in being less
masculine; but the topsy-turvy Athenian men looked down on them
because they were _not_ more masculine and because they lacked the
education which they themselves perversely refused to give them! Few
Athenian women could read or write, nor had they much use for such
accomplishments, being practically condemned to life-long
imprisonment. The men indorsed the Oriental idea that educating a
woman is an unwise and reprehensible thing.[312]

Widely as the Athenian way of treating women differed from the
Spartan, the result was the same--the frustration of pure love. The
girls were married off in their early teens, before what little mind
they had was developed, to men whom they had never seen before, and in
the selection of whom they were not consulted; the result being, in
the words of a famous orator, that the men married respectable women
for the sake of rearing legitimate offspring, keeping concubines for
the daily wants and care of the body, and associating with hetairai
for pleasant companionship. Hence, as Becker justly remarks (III.,
337), though we come across stories of passionate love in the pages of
Terence (_i.e._ Menander) and other Greek writers, "sensuality was
always the soil from which such passion sprang, and none other than a
sensual love between a man and a woman was even acknowledged."

LITERATURE AND LIFE

Although dogs are the most intelligent of all animals and at the same
time proverbial for their faithful attachment to their masters, they
are nevertheless, as I have before pointed out, in their sexual
relations utterly incapable of that approximation to conjugal love
which we find instinctive in some birds. Most readers of this book,
too, are probably acquainted with men and women, who while highly
educated and refined, as well as devoted to the members of their
family, are strangers to romantic love; and I have pointed out (302)
that men of genius may in this respect be in the same