of woman's environment, and with the force
of irresistible genius broke triumphantly into new fields of action and
powerful mental activity, standing side by side with the male; but their
cases were exceptional. Had they, or such as they, been able to tread
down a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women might have
followed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of the
dominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise from
their condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken their
share in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race,
Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourth
century, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls in
at the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip,
and then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlike
son, who was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitable
Olympia. (Like almost all men remarkable for either good or evil,
Alexander inherited from his mother his most notable qualities--his
courage, his intellectual activity, and an ambition indifferent to any
means that made for his own end. Fearless in her life, she fearlessly
met death "with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character,
when her hour of retribution came"; and Alexander is incomprehensible
till we recognise him as rising from the womb of Olympia.) Nor could
she have been swept clean, a few hundred years later, from Thessaly to
Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed, her effete women
captured by the hordes of the Goths--a people less skilfully armed
and less civilised than the descendants of the race of Pericles and
Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk whose
monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless,
labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the
ends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men.

In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured
mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden,
though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller
than that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to
supplant her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman
in the days of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functions
and bore the whole weight of domestic toil