bond. Hence
the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles
away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to
find the completion of his life.

In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to
be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of
whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these,
Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was
no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in
whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates,
Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides.

This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving
wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in
eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and
woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law,
lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests
its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.
So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into
the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the
decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic
Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the
deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace,
bourgeoisie in power.

So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended
alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are
the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and
diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic
conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and
economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them,
and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent
forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.

The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a
patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition
handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.
The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite
but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the
Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena an