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Eleusis (search for this): chapter 10
nd the Olympic games; all these saw womanhood deified in their goddesses and dignified in themselves. The vast religious ceremonial appealed alike to the high-born maidens who ministered at the altars, and to the peasant-girls through whom the oracles spoke. Every range of condition and of culture might be comprised among the hundreds who assembled before daybreak to bathe the image of Pallas in the sacred river, or the thousands who walked with consecrated feet in the long procession to Eleusis. In individual cases, the service brought out such noble virtue as that of the priestess Theano, who, when Alcibiades was exiled from Athens and was sentenced to be cursed by all who served at the altar, alone refused to obey, saying that she was consecrated to bless and not to curse. But even among the mass of Greek women, where so much time was spent in sharing or observing this ritual of worship, life must have taken some element of elevation through contact with the great ideal women
Becker (search for this): chapter 10
rtists of immortal works, and grandly characterizes them as women who spoke like gods in their hymns. qeoglw/|ssous gunai=kas u(/mnois. I do not propose to go further, and discuss the actual condition of the average Greek woman. That would demand an essay by itself. You may place the actual condition of any class very high or very low if you look at it two thousand years after, and select all the facts either on the favorable or on the unfavorable side. Yet this is what St. John and Becker, for instance, in writing of the Greek women, have respectively done. I can honestly say that all modern literature and art taken together seem to me to have paid to woman no tribute so reverential as in the worship of the great ideals I have named. But in actual life it must be owned that there seems to have been the same strange mingling of delicate courtesy and of gross contempt for woman which marks our society to-day. Margaret Fuller, whose opinion on this subject was worth more than
Jupiter (search for this): chapter 10
re a great strife between thee and me. It seems a doubtful state of discipline. But if we will deify marriage, we must take the consequences. Still there is a prevailing grandeur and dignity in their relation. Margaret Fuller, whose writings show so fine an instinct for the Greek symbolism, points out that on antique gems and bas-reliefs, in the meetings between god and goddess, they rather offer to one another the full flower of being than grow together. As in the figures before me, Jupiter, king of gods and men, meets Juno, the sister and queen, not as a chivalric suppliant, but as a stately claimant, and she, crowned, pure, majestic, holds the veil aside to reveal herself to her august spouse. Accordingly, when Zeus embraces Hera on Mount Ida, clothed in fascinations like those of Aphrodite, all nature is hushed, in Homer's description; the contending armies are still; before this sublime union, these tokens of reverence are fitting. The union of husband and wife-a thin
Persephone (search for this): chapter 10
Semele. Demeter is, like Hera, both sister and in a manner wife of Zeus, to bring her into equality with him. Yet she is a virgin, even when she bears a child, Persephone or Proserpine. In a sense this maiden is the child of Zeus, but not in a mortal manner,--by an ineffable conception, a)/rrh/thoisi gonai=s. Hymn 29.7. says thnce of Demeter for her own mother carries the sacredness of maternity a generation further back, so it is carried a generation further forward by the refusal of Persephone to return permanently to the upper world. Having eaten pomegranate seeds, the legend says, she will go back to her husband. But the pomegranate is the symbol symbol of the Eleusinian mysteries, ranking first among the religious ceremonials of Greece. The Mother and Daughter, on Athenian lips, mean always Demeter and Persephone; and through them this relation is glorified, as wifehood becomes sublime in Hera, love in Aphrodite, and maidenhood, active or contemplative, in Artemis and At
Sophocles (search for this): chapter 10
here in a recess of the lofty house lies long-robed Helen, a divine one among women! The same stateliness of tone, with finer spiritual touches, may be found throughout the Greek tragedies. The Alcestis and Antigone are world-renowned delineations of noble and tender womanhood, and there are many companion pictures. I know not where in literature to look for a lovelier touch of feminine feeling,--a trait more unlike those portrayed by Thackeray, for instance,--than in the Deianira of Sophocles (in the Trachiniae), who receives with abundant compassion the female slaves sent home by Hercules, resolves that no added pain shall come to them from her, and even when she discovers one of them to be the beloved mistress of her husband, still forgives the girl, in the agony of her own grief. I pity her most of all, she says, because her own beauty has blasted her life, ruined her nation, and made her a slave. Why is Euripides so often described as a hater of women? So far as I can
Pindar (search for this): chapter 10
saying that she was consecrated to bless and not to curse. But even among the mass of Greek women, where so much time was spent in sharing or observing this ritual of worship, life must have taken some element of elevation through contact with the great ideal women of the sky. We cannot now know, but can only conjecture, how far the same religious influence inspired those Greek women who, in more secular spheres of duty, left their names on their country's records. When Corinna defeated Pindar in competing for the poetic prize; when Helen of Alexandria painted her great historic picture, consecrated in the Temple of Peace; when the daughter of Thucydides aided or completed her father's great literary work; when the Athenian Agnodice studied medicine, disguised as a man, and practised it as a man, and was prosecuted as a seducer, and then, revealing her sex, was prosecuted for her deception, till the chief women of Athens appeared in her behalf and secured for their sex the right t
Lempriere (search for this): chapter 10
1835, that they have generally appeared in English books under their own proper titles. With the Latin names came a host of later traditions, mostly foreign to the Greek mind, generally tending toward the trivial and the prosaic. Shakespeare in French does not more instantly cease to be Shakespeare, than the great ideals vacate their shrines when Latinized. Jeanne d'arc, in the hands of Voltaire, suffers hardly more defamation of character than the Greek goddesses under the treatment of Lempriere. Now that this defilement is being cleared away, we begin to see how much of the stateliness of polytheism lay in its ideal women. Monotheism is inevitable; there never was a polytheism in the world, but so soon as it produced a thinker it became a monotheism after all. Then it instantly became necessary to say He or She in speaking of the Highest; and the immediate result was a masculine Deity, and the dethronement of woman. Whatever the advantage gained, this imperfection of languag
Ludovisi Juno (search for this): chapter 10
y, are represented — to give both the Greek and the more familiar but more deceptive Latin namesby Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Venus, Hera or Juno, Demeter or Ceres, and Hestia or Vesta. First comes the epoch of free girlhood, symbolized by Artemis, the Roman Diana. Her very name signifies health and vigors him no children. Hence Hera wears a diadem and a bridal veil; her beauty is of a commanding type, through the large eyes and the imperious smile, as in the Ludovisi Juno. Winckelmann says it is impossible to mistake a head of Hera. Athena commands like a princess; Hera, like a queen. Her name is connected with the Aeolic e)n god and goddess, they rather offer to one another the full flower of being than grow together. As in the figures before me, Jupiter, king of gods and men, meets Juno, the sister and queen, not as a chivalric suppliant, but as a stately claimant, and she, crowned, pure, majestic, holds the veil aside to reveal herself to her aug
Hermodorus (search for this): chapter 10
t sublime cradle, and, whenever she bows her head, it is as if Zeus had nodded,--a privilege which he has given to her alone. That is ratified to which Pallas hath bowed assent, says Callimachus. to\ d'e)ntele\s w(=| k' e)pineu/sh=| *palla/s. Callimi., Hymn V. 131, 132. Yet while thus falling but one degree below omnipotence, she possesses a beauty which is beyond that of Aphrodite. If the cowherd Alexander (Paris) judges otherwise, it is merely the taste of a cowherd, as the epigram of Hermodorus fearlessly declares. The busts of Athena seem always grave and sweet; never domineering, like those of Artemis, nor languishing, like those of Aphrodite. They are known from all others by the length of the hair, whence the Greek oath, by the tresses of Athena. In the descriptions, she alone is blue-eyed, to show that she dwells above all clouds, while even the auburn-haired Aphrodite, in the Iliad, has large black eyes. She is more heavily armed than the fleet-footed Artemis, and som
Artemis Brauronia (search for this): chapter 10
she was thenceforth the Hestia of her own home, at least. Her life was like a revolving urn, upon which she could always see one great symbolic image sculptured, though each in its turn gave way to another. And this influence was enhanced by the actual participation of Greek women in the ceremonies of religion, when conducted upon a scale that our modern imaginations can hardly reproduce. The little five-year-old maids, yellow-clad, who chanted lines from Homer at the festival of Artemis Brauronia; the virgins who from seven to eleven dwelt on the rock of the Acropolis, and wove the sacred garment of Athena, themselves robed in white, with ornaments of gold; the flower-wreathed girls who bore baskets through the streets at the Panathensea; the matrons who directed the festival of Hera at Elis; the maidens who ran in that sacred race, knowing that the victor's portrait would be dedicated in the temple; the high-priestess of Hera at Argos, from whose accession the citizens dated t
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