.

Some students who shrink in horror from the Egyptian type of
civilization plead nevertheless for the type which was manifested in
ancient Greece. Let us go, then, to Athens in the age of Pericles, that
period of her glory concerning which Professor Freeman somewhere says
that to have lived but ten years in the midst of it would have been
worth a hundred of modern mediocrity. Who can think otherwise as he
recalls the Athenian drama, eloquence and philosophy, architecture and
sculpture? But when one turns to the organization of society, as it was
in Athens, to find out at what human price the splendor was bought of
that dazzling decade when the Parthenon was being built, one finds that
of the inhabitants of that City of the Light scarcely more than thirty
thousand were free men, while two hundred thousand were slaves. Again,
the living foundations groan! And if our heart, by its nature, insists
on going out to the sacrificed, our delight in Athenian _Kultur_ will
be henceforth shot through with anguish. Our only way of escape will be
by absorbing Nietzsche into our system until the poison paralyzes our
impulse to pity. But you may think that if we shift our investigation,
we shall find relief. Let us enquire, then, into the position of woman
instead of the man-slave in Athens. Alas! we are now confronted with
facts which reveal, on the part of one whole half of Greek mankind, the
surrender of their distinctive humanity to civilization, to that
process whereby sentient beings are transformed from beasts into
citizens. Professor Westermarck sums up the attitude of civilization to
women in these terms:--

Nowhere else has the difference in culture between men and women
been so immense as in the fully-developed Greek civilization. The
lot of a wife in Greece was retirement and ignorance. She lived in
almost absolute seclusion, in a separate part of the house,
together with her female slaves, deprived of all the educating
influence of male society, and having no place at those public
spectacles which were the chief means of culture.

He then calls attention to the startling absence from the whole of
Greek literature of any evidence that any man who had received the
training which Greek culture gave ever fell in love with any woman. In
his chapter on the "Subjection of Wives," Professor Westermarck further
says:--

The status of wives is in various respects connected with the ideas