WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 19 



and greater legal rights than Greek women had ever 

 known, and was treated rather as the peer and companion 

 of man than as his toy or his slave. 



Besides this, foreign women were never so conspicu- 

 ous in Rome as in Athens. Even after Greece had become 

 a Roman province, and after Grcecia capta Romam cepit 

 when Greek ideas and Greek customs were introduced into 

 the capital of the Roman world it was still the Roman 

 matron that was supreme. And, although many Greek 

 women, some of them of rare beauty and culture, found 

 their way to Rome, especially under the empire, they were 

 always kept in the background and never succeeded in 

 achieving anything approaching the ascendancy which 

 distinguished them during the time of Aspasia. Their 

 influence in literature and politics was almost nil. 



In the case of the women of Rome, on the contrary, it 

 may well be questioned whether woman has ever wielded a 

 greater influence than she did during the three centuries 

 that followed the reign of Augustus. But she did not at- 

 tain to this position of preeminence without a long and 

 bitter struggle. Every advance toward the goal of social 

 and intellectual equality was strenuously contested by the 

 men, who wished to limit the activities of their wives to 

 the spindle, the distaff and the loom and the other occupa- 

 tions of the household. For, as in Greece, the generally 

 accepted view was that woman, in the language of Gib- 

 bon, "was created to please and obey. She was never sup- 

 posed to have reached the age of reason or experience. " 

 And her noblest epitaph, it was averred, was couched in 

 the following words: 



"She was gentle, pious, loved her husband, was 

 skillful at the loom and a good housekeeper." 1 



lit was the boast of the Emperor Augustus that all his clothes 

 were woven by his wife, sister or daughter. Suetonius, in his Lives 

 of the Twelve Ccesars, informs us that this great master of the world 

 filiam et neptes ita instituit ut etiam lanificio assuefaceret. 



