Aristotle appears to
have been the only Greek philosopher who recognized the fact that
"each sex has its own peculiar virtues in which the other rejoices;"
yet there is no indication that even he meant by this anything more
than the qualities in a woman of being a good nurse and a chaste
housemaid.[310] Plato, as we have seen, considered woman inferior to
man because she lacked the masculine qualities which he would have
liked to educate into her; and this remained the Greek attitude to the
end, as we realize vividly on reading the special treatise of
Plutarch--who flourished nearly half a thousand years after Plato--_On
the Virtues of Women_, in which, by way of proving "that the virtues
of a man and a woman do not differ," a number of stories are told of
heroic deeds, military, patriotic, and otherwise, performed by women.
Greek ideas on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology.
Of their four principal goddesses--using the more familiar Latin
names--Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are
Amazons or hermaphrodites--masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno,
as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly
marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, "by no means on its
higher side." Regarding Minerva, he remarks with equal aptness that
"she is a goddess, not a god; but she has nothing of sex except the
gender, nothing of the woman except the form.
Pages:
1146
1147
1148
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170