278 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



Tales," there is an allusion to affairs of love and 

 even an intimation of some refinement of feeling in 

 the relation between man and woman; but these 

 are very exceptional utterances, and the idea of 

 self-aggrandizement in this life and in the next is 

 everywhere dominant. The Homeric poems taught 

 " discipline, arms, and equipment of war," and reflect 

 man's love of himself and his infinite capacity for 

 brutalities of all sorts. The nobler forms of attach- 

 ment between the sexes do not seriously burden the 

 poet. Penelope was certainly patient in waiting for 

 Odysseus, and Andromache appears to have been 

 pained to part with Hector, but there is no reason 

 to believe that this devotion was anything but one- 

 sided, the man being bent on the pursuit of what he 

 thought to be glory. Plato had the intelligence to 

 see that a state could not be strong where its women 

 were so undervalued and insulted that they suffered 

 in physique from the neglect to which they were 

 subjected ; his advocacy of their rights rested on 

 practical rather than sentimental motives. The 

 sympathetic and understanding attitude of Euripides 

 toward women (as shown, for example, in his Medea) 

 but serves to emphasize by contrast the universal 

 predominance in Greek literature of the self-glorifica- 

 tion of the male. There is nothing to suggest that 

 the sex instinct had developed in men and women 

 the finest traits of personal devotion. The same 

 hardness, due to the mastery of the self-preservative 

 instincts, is seen in the Old Testament. Christ 



