most unfortunate for Greece that they were excluded from diplomacy. In the Thesmophoria-festival the female chorus leader asks why, if women are a curse, men woo them, pursue, guard, and watch them, and follow them when they go away. She tells the men that they rob the public treasury and that some of them threw away their arms in battle and ran. Bruns[1] takes the comedies of Aristophanes as proof that there had been earlier a discussion of woman's right and status which is not in the literature, and that in this discussion it had been proposed to admit them to political functions and military service.
Thus it appears that at the end of the fifth century there was some agitation of the question of woman's status and function in society. The philosophers of the fourth century took part in the discussion. The first document is the dialogue in Xenophon's Economicus. Ischomachus, supposed to be Xenophon, gives a rhetorical and artificial statement. It is, however, very remarkable that, even in the way of fiction, any man of that time could imagine a man making such an attempt to get upon a basis of affectionate confidence and cooperation with his wife, for the story stands entirely by itself in the literature. The other participants in the dialogue hear with astonishment his story of his method with his wife, and what he tells of the response of the young woman shows that she had had no education to enable her to understand it; that is to say, it was entirely outside of the mores of the society. Plato thought that the question was real, because one-half of the state was losing its effective force and happiness; he wanted women educated better, but he thought of Spartan ways with favor, even those which seemed devised to eradicate feminine
- ↑ Frauenemancipation in Athen, 21.
