(See Jowett's translation of Plato's "Banquet"; but for full light on this important question the entire literature of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.should be studied.) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier still a Sappho, burst through the confining bonds of woman's environment, and with the force of irresistible genius broke triumphantly into new fields of action and powerful mental activity, standing side by side with the male; but their cases were exceptional.

Had they, or such as they, been able to tread down a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women might have followed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of the dominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise from their condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken their share in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race, Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourth century, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls in at the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip, and then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlike son, who was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitable Olympia.

(Like almost all men remarkable for either good or evil, Alexander inherited from his mother his most notable qualities--his courage, his intellectual activity, and an ambition indifferent to any means that made for his own end.

Fearless in her life, she fearlessly met death "with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character, when her hour of retribution came"; and Alexander is incomprehensible till we recognise him as rising from the womb of Olympia.) Nor could she have been swept clean, a few hundred years later, from Thessaly to Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed, her effete women captured by the hordes of the Goths--a people less skilfully armed and less civilised than the descendants of the race of Pericles and Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk whose monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless, labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the ends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men.
In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden, though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller than that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to supplant her own.

From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman in the days of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functions and bore the whole weight of domestic toil.