women justice. We
should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of woman
in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican
disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in
the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the Athenian
women were not only not in politics, but were not even in society,
except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and we should
freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspiration of the
men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well as in the field. We
should recognize the sort of middle station women held in the Roman
republic, where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental seclusion
of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in competitive athletics like
the Spartan daughters. We should note that if a Spartan mother had the
habit of bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Roman mother
expressed a finer sense of her importance in the state when she
intimated that it was enough for her to be the parent of the Gracchi.
But we should not insist upon our point, which, after all, would not
prove that the decorative quality of women in public life was recognized
in Rome as it always has been in monarchies, and we should recur to the
fact that this was the point which had been made against all republics.
Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have to own that Venice,
with her ducal figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone
as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established
themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than
in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such
distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace
annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female
name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with
the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes
Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de
Pompadour, following one another in brilliant succession, and sharing
not only the glory but the authority of the line of princes whose
affections they ruled. Of course, we should have to use an ironical
gravity in concealing their real quality and the character of the courts
where they flourished; and in comparing the womanless obscurity of the
English Commonwealth with the feminine effulgence of