This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving wife.  It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in eighteenth-century France.  But the normal human unit is the man and woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law, lust, love and dishonor.  Such a triangle of two women and a man rests its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.  So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace, bourgeoisie in power.

So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic conditions.  These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them, and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent forces.  These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.

The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.  The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera.  They covered the Acropolis with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries.  So, too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.  In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as Brunhilda.  These ideas must have done much to offset the physical weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.

The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to women.  In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of women along with that of all human beings.  But, as between man and woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19]

[19] JAMES DONALDSON, Woman:  Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907.