her home, neither good nor bad is
heard."

With such views, respect for woman was bound to sink to a low level;
fear of over-population even led to the avoidance of intimate
intercourse with her. Unnatural means of satisfying sexual desires were
resorted to. The Greek states were cities with small territories, unable
to supply the usual sustenance to a population in excess of a given
number. Hence the fear of over-population caused Aristotle to recommend
to the men abstinence from their wives, and pederasty, instead. Before
him, Socrates had praised pederasty as the sign of a higher culture. In
the end, the most promising men of Greece became adherents of this
unnatural passion. Regard for women sank all the deeper. There were now
houses for male prostitutes, as there were for female. In such a social
atmosphere, it was natural for Thucydides to utter the saying that woman
was worse than the storm-lashed ocean's wave, than the fire's glow, than
the cascade of the wild mountain torrent. "If it is a God that invented
woman, wherever, he may be, let him know, that he is the unhallowed
cause of the greatest evil."[13]

The male population of Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the
female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of
members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the
island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be
named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among
us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six
hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading
representative of this form of love. Her passion is glowingly expressed
in her hymn to Aphrodite, whom she implores:

"Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite,
Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee,
Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress,
Nay, nor with anguish."

A still more passionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the
handsome Atthis.

While in Athens, along with the rest of Greece, the father-right ruled,
Sparta, the rival for supremacy with Athens, still continued under the
mother-right, a condition that had become wholly foreign to most Greeks.
The story runs that one day a Greek asked a Spartan what punishment was
meted out in Sparta to the adulterer. He answered: "Stranger, among us
there are no adulterers." "But if there should be any?" "For
punishment," the Spartan r