mong the lonians of Asia, according to Herodotus, the wife did not share the table of her husband; she dared not call him by his name, but addressed him with the title of "Lord"; and this was hardly an exaggeration of the social habits of Athens itself. But among the Dorians of Sparta, and probably among the Æolians as well, the husband called his wife "mistress," not in subserviency, but after the English peasant fashion; Spartan mothers preserved a power over their adult sons such as was nowhere else seen; the dignity of maidenhood was celebrated in public songs, called "Parthenia," which were peculiar to Sparta; and the women took so free a part in the conversation, that Socrates, in a half-sarcastic passage in the "Protagoras," compares their quickness of wit to that of the men. [1]   The Spartan women, in short, were free, though ignorant, and this freedom the Athenians thought bad enough. But when the Æolians of Lesbos carried the equality a step further, and to freedom added culture, the Athenians found it intolerable. Such an innovation was equivalent to setting up the Protestant theory of woman's position as against the Roman Catholic, or the English against the French.

It is perhaps fortunate for historic justice that we have within our reach an illustration so obvious, showing the way in which a whole race of women may be misconstrued. If a Frenchman visits America and sees a young girl walking or riding with a young man, he is apt to assume that she is of doubtful character. Should he hear a married woman talk about "emancipation," he will infer either that her marriage is not legal, or that her husband has good reason to wish it were not. Precisely thus did an Athenian view a Lesbian woman; and if she collected round her a class of young pupils for instruction, so much the worse. He could no more imagine any difference between Sappho and Aspasia, than could a Frenchman between Margaret Fuller and George Sand. To claim any high moral standard, in either case, would merely strengthen the indictment by the additional count of hypocrisy. Better Aspasia than a learned woman who had the effrontery to set up for the domestic virtues. The stories that thus gradually came to be told about Sappho in later years -- scandal at longer and longer range -- were simply inevitable, from the point of view of Athens. If Aristophanes spared neither Socrates nor Euripides, why should his successors spare Sappho?

Therefore the reckless comic authors of that luxurious city, those Pre-Bohemians of literature, made the most of their game. Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, Timodes, all wrote farces bearing the name of a woman who had died in excellent repute, so far as appears, two centuries before. With what utter recklessness they did their work is shown by their naming as her lovers Archilochus, who died before she was born, and Hipponax, who was born after she died. Then came, in later literature, the Roman Ovid, who had learned from licentious princesses to regard womanly virtue as only a pretty fable. He took up the tale of Sappho, conjured up a certain Phaon, with whom she might be enamored, and left her memory covered with stains such as even the Leucadian leap could not purge. Finally, since Sappho was a heathen, a theologian was found at last to make an end of her; the Church put an apostolic sanction upon these corrupt reveries of the Roman profligate, and Tatian, the Christian Father, fixed her name in ecclesiastical tradition as that of "an impure and lovesick woman who sings her own shame." [2]

The process has, alas! plenty of parallels in history. Worse, for instance, than the malice of the Greek comedians or of Ovid -- since they possibly believed their own stories -- was the attempt made by Voltaire to pollute, through twenty-one books of an epic poem, the stainless fame of his own virgin countrywoman, Joan of Arc. In that work he revels in a series of impurities so loathsome that the worst of them are omitted from the common editions, and only lurk in appendices, here and there, as if even the shameless printing-presses of Paris were ashamed of them. Suppose, now, that the art of printing had remained undiscovered, that all contemporary memorials of this maiden had vanished, and posterity had possessed no record of her except Voltaire's "Pucelle." In place of that heroic image there would have remained to us only a monster of profligacy, unless some possible Welcker had appeared, long centuries after, to right the wrong.

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¹ The best authority in regard to the Spartan women is K. 0. Müller's Dorier, Book IV. C. iv., also Book V. c. viii. (Eng. tr. vol. II. pp. 290-300; also p. 311). For his view of the women of Lesbos, see his "Literature of Greece" (Eng. tr.), C. XIII.
² Tatian, Adv. "Græcos" c.33 Ovid, Heroid., XV. 61-70