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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



clothes are drying, they first picnic by the side 

 of the river, and then, to amuse themselves, en- 

 gage in a game at ball, accompanied with singing. 

 This is a day with Homeric girls. They can do 

 everything that is necessary — drive, wash, spin 

 and sew. No domestic work comes amiss to one 

 and all. And they are much in the open air. 

 They thus all find active employment. Time 

 never hangs heavy on their hands. And the 

 strength and freshness of body produce a sweet- 

 ness of temper and a soundness of mind which 

 act like a charm on all the men who have to do 

 with them. It seems to me that this explains to 

 some extent the phenomena of the Homeric 

 poems. There is no vicious woman in the " Iliad " 

 or "Odyssey." Some of them have committed 

 glaring violations of the ordinary rules of life, 

 but they are merely temporary aberrations or fits 

 of madness. And there is no prostitution. This 

 healthiness explains also another feature of the 

 Homeric women which deserves notice. There 

 was an extraordinary number of very beautiful 

 women. The district of Thessaly, from which 

 the whole of Greece ultimately derived its own 

 name of Hellas, is characterized by the epithet 

 the land of the beautiful women ; and several 

 other places are so characterized. But their 

 type of beauty was not the type prevalent in 

 modern times. Health was the first condition of 

 beauty. The beautiful woman was well-propor- 

 tioned in every feature and limb. It was the 

 grace and harmony of every part that constituted 

 beauty. Hence height was regarded as an es- 

 sential requisite. Helen is taller than all her 

 companions. The commanding stature impressed 

 the Greeks as being a near approach to the au- 

 gust forms of the goddesses. As one might ex- 

 pect, the beauty of the women is not confined to 

 the young girl between the ages of seventeen and 

 twenty. A Homeric woman remained beautiful 

 for a generation or two. Helen was, in the eye 

 of the Greek, as beautiful at forty or fifty as she 

 was at twenty, and piobably as attractive, if not 

 more so. The Homeric Greek admired the full- 

 developed woman as much as the growing girl. 



Such then were these Homeric Greek women. 

 The Greek race was the finest race that ever ex- 

 isted in respect of physical development and in- 

 tellectual power. Do we not see, in the account 

 that Homer gives of the women, something like 

 an explanation of the phenomenon ? A race of 

 healthy, finely-formed women is the natural ante- 

 cedent to a race of men possessed of a high phys- 

 ical and intellectual organization. 



When we pass from Homer, we enter a new 



region. We do not know how far Homer's char- 

 acters are historical. We cannot doubt that the 

 manner and ways of the men and women whom 

 he describes were like those of the real men and 

 women among whom he lived. He may have 

 idealized a little, but even his idealizations are 

 indicative of the current of his age. But we know 

 little of the modes in which the various states 

 of Greece were constituted, and of the relations 

 which subsisted between them. We have to pass 

 over a long period which is a practical blank, and 

 then we come to historical Greece. In historical 

 Greece we have no unity of the Greek nation. 

 We have men of Greek blood, but these men did 

 not dream of forming themselves into one nation, 

 ruled by the same laws, and mutually helpful of 

 each other. The Greek mind regarded the city 

 as the greatest political organization possible, or 

 at any rate compatible with the adequate dis- 

 charge of the functions of a state. And accord- 

 ingly if we could give a full account of woman in 

 Greece, we should have to detail the arrangements 

 made in each particular state. There are no ma- 

 terials for such an account if we wished to give 

 it; but even if there had been, it is probable that 

 we should not have learned much more than we 

 learn from the histories of the two most promi- 

 nent of those states, Sparta and Athens. It is 

 to the position and influence of women in these 

 states that we must turn our attention. 



To form anything like a just conception of the 

 Spartan state, we must keep clearly in view the 

 notion which the ancients generally and the Spar- 

 tans in particular had of a state. The ancients 

 were strongly impressed with the decay and mor- 

 tality of the individual man ; but they felt equally 

 strongly the perpetuity of the race through the 

 succession of one generation after another. Ac- 

 cordingly, when a state was formed, the most 

 prominent idea that pervaded all legislation was 

 the permanence of the state, and the continuance 

 of the worship of the gods. They paid lirtle re- 

 gard to individual wishes. They thought little 

 of individual freedom. The individual was for 

 the state, not the state for the individual, and 

 accordingly all private and personal considera- 

 tions must be sacrificed without hesitation to the 

 strength and permanence of the state. A pecul- 

 iar turn was given to this idea in Sparta. From 

 the circumstances in which the Spartans were 

 placed, they had to make up their minds to be a 

 race of soldiers. They had numerous slaves in 

 their possession to do everything requisite for 

 procuring the necessaries of life. They therefore 

 had no call to labor. But if they were to retain 



