26 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



seeing how her mother 's handmaidens had their daily spin- 

 ning tasks assigned to them." Cornelia, on the contrary, 

 was not only, as we have seen, highly accomplished, but 

 also one who, after her husband 's death, was quite pre- 

 pared, as Plutarch assures us, to undertake the manage- 

 ment of the extensive property which he left his family, 

 and who, we may well believe, would also have been quali- 

 fied, had the occasion demanded it, to perform with dis- 

 tinction the same duties that fell to the lot of the gifted 

 wives of Germanicus and Augustus. 



Nothing in the history of Greek and Roman womanhood 

 more strikingly illustrates than the two instances given 

 the vast difference in the status of the wives of Greece 

 and Rome, or exhibits more clearly the advantages ac- 

 cruing to early training and thorough mental development. 

 If there was any difference in talent or intellect between 

 the Greek and the Roman woman it was, so far as we can 

 determine, in favor of the Greek. The sole reason, then, 

 for such a marked difference in their capacity for work 

 and for achieving distinction in intellectual and adminis- 

 trative fields of action arose from the lack of education in 

 the Athenian wife and the fullest measure of educational 

 freedom enjoyed by the Roman. That Aspasia, in spite 

 of all the odds against her, was able to rise to such a 

 pinnacle of glory does not prove that she was the superior 

 of her countrywomen the mothers of the greatest poets, 

 artists and philosophers of all time but it exhibits rather 

 her good fortune in being able to effect a partnership with 

 the greatest statesman of Greece, and one who was at the 

 same time fully able to appreciate all her rare mental at- 

 tainments and give her marvelous genius free scope for 

 development by cooperating with him in making the 

 period during which he held the reign of power the most 

 brilliant one in the annals of human progress. 



Plato, referring to the oriental seclusion to which Athe- 

 nian wives were condemned, speaks of them as "a race 



