WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 5 



general attitude of the Athenians toward woman was any- 

 thing but favorable to her intellectual development, or to 

 her exerting any influence beyond the limits of her own 

 household. And what is said of the Greeks can be affirmed, 

 with still greater emphasis, of the other nations of an- 

 tiquity. Indeed, it can be safely asserted that, had they 

 all entered into a solemn compact systematically to dis- 

 credit woman's mental capacity and to repress all her 

 noblest aspirations, they could not have succeeded more 

 effectually than by the methods they severally adopted. In 

 ancient Greece the condition of woman was little better 

 than it is in India to-day under the law of Manu, where 

 the husband, no matter how unworthy he may be, must be 

 regarded by the wife as a god. 



And yet, notwithstanding the dominant force of public 

 opinion and the strange traditional prejudices that pos- 

 sessed for the majority of people all the semblance and 

 commanding power of truth, woman was here and there 

 able to break through the barriers that impeded her pro- 

 gress in her quest of knowledge and to defy the social con- 

 ventions that precluded her from being seen or heard in 

 the intellectual arena. 



One of the first and most notable of Greek women to 

 assert her independence and to emerge from the intellec- 

 tual eclipse which had so long kept her sex in obscurity, 

 was the Lesbian Sappho, who, as a lyric poet, stands, even 

 to-day, without a superior. So great was her renown 

 among the ancients that she was called "The Poetess," as 

 Homer was called "The Poet." Solon, on hearing one of 

 her songs sung at a banquet, begged the singer to teach it 

 to him at once that he might learn it and die. Aristotle did 

 not hesitate to endorse a judgment that ranked her with 

 Homer and Archilochus, while Plato, in his Phsedrus, exalts 

 her still higher by proclaiming her "the tenth Muse." 

 Horace and Ovid and Catullus strove to reproduce her pas- 

 sionate strains and rhythmic beauty ; but their efforts were 



