of all feminine qualities except such as were absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the species.  One of the avowed objects of making girls dance naked in the presence of men was to destroy what they considered as effeminate modesty.  The law which forbade husbands to associate with their wives in the daytime prevented the growth of any sentimental, sympathetic attachment between husband and wife.  Even maternal feeling was suppressed, as far as possible, Spartan mothers being taught to feel proud and happy if their sons fell in battle, disgraced and unhappy if they survived in case of defeat.  The sole object, in brief, of Spartan institutions relating to women was to rear a breed of healthy animals for the purpose of supplying the state with warriors.  Not love, but patriotism, was the underlying motive of these institutions.  To patriotism, the most masculine of all virtues, the lives of these women were immolated, and what made it worse was that, while they were reared as men, these women could not share the honors of men.  Brought up as warriors, they were still despised by the warriors, who, when they wanted companionship, always sought it in association with comrades of their own sex.  In a word, instead of honoring the female sex, the Spartans suppressed and dishonored it.  But they brought on their own punishment; for the women, being left in charge of affairs at home during the frequent absence of their warlike husbands and sons, learned to command slaves, and, after the manner of the African Amazons we have read about, soon tried to lord it over their husbands too.

And this utter suppression of femininity, this glorification of the Amazon—­a being as repulsive to every refined mind as an effeminate man—­has been lauded by a host of writers as emancipation and progress!

“If your reputation for prowess and the battles you have fought were taken away from you Spartans, in all else, be very sure, you have not your inferiors,” exclaims Peleus in the Andromache of Euripides, thus summing up Athenian opinion on Sparta.  There was, however, one other respect in which the enemies of Sparta admired her.  C.O.  Mueller alludes to it in the following (II., 304): 

“Little as the Athenians esteemed their own women, they involuntarily revered the heroines of Sparta, such as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas; Lampito, the daughter of Leotychidas, the wife of Archidamus and mother of Agis.”

This is not surprising, for in Athens, as among the Spartans and all other Greeks, patriotism was the supreme virtue, and women could be compared with men only in so far as they had the opportunity and courage to participate in this masculine virtue.  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