ime, these virile labouring women in the upper
classes were to be found no more. The accumulated wealth of the dominant
race, gathered through the labour of slaves and subject people, had so
immensely increased that there was no longer a call for physical labour
on the part of the dominant womanhood; immured within the walls of their
houses as wives or mistresses, waited on by slaves and dependents, they
no longer sustained by their exertion either their own life or the life
of their people. The males absorbed the intellectual labours of life;
slaves and dependents the physical. For a moment, at the end of the
fifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood of
Greece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliant
intellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous colours
in the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking; but the heart
of Greece was already rotting and her vigour failing. Increasingly,
division and dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male
advanced in culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil
while the female sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life,
and thus was made ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not
bridge. The abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations
upon the highest plane was one, and the most serious result, of this
severance. The inevitable and invincible desire of all highly developed
human natures, to blend with their sexual relationships their highest
intellectual interests and sympathies, could find no satisfaction or
response in the relationship between the immured, comparatively ignorant
and helpless females of the upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant,
cultured, and many-sided males who formed its dominant class in the
fifth and fourth centuries. Man turned towards man; and parenthood, the
divine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest and
profoundest phases of human emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant
and miserable little life between the walls of her house, and Socrates
lay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades;
and the race decayed at its core. (See Jowett's translation of Plato's
"Banquet"; but for full light on this important question the entire
literature of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. should be
studied.) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier still a Sappho, burst
through the confining bonds