Page 4 of 38
As soon as the god sees her, he asks where she is[24] going, and she repeats again the story of Oceanus and Tethys' misadventures and her projected intervention. But the god tells her brusquely, like a real master of the harem, that he needs her presence and that she can go there another day: then, as a climax of good taste, he recites the long list of his mistresses, beginning with Ixion's wife and ending with Leto. To this impassioned love-making, worthy of Don Juan himself, Hera, 'the crafty,' replies at first with an affectation of modesty, but the scene ends with the god in her arms: her purpose is accomplished and man once again is beguiled.
Dr. Leaf finds the passage full of 'healthy sensuousness,' but to other readers it may well seem thoroughly unpleasant, both in its sentiment and its language---for example, the horrible reiteration of , 'mon chri,' at the end of Hera's speech of invitation. Still, it is a valuable document. The brutal god and the crafty goddess are plainly the poet's ideals of man and woman; and his ideals are very low.
These two passages from the Iliad may serve as specimens of the second method of attack, that of sarcastic depreciation under the guise of realism, of which we have some further examples in Hesiod.
The strange medley that now bears his name is in the same position as the Iliad. There is much ancient wisdom, in which woman has little part.[25] 'Get first a house, and then a woman, and then a ploughing ox,' and there are also many passages plainly inspired by the new Ionian spirit.
The few facts that we know of Hesiod's life would suggest that he was an Ionian poet who migrated to Botia, and incorporated into his verse the ancient lore of the country, much of it as old as anything we have in Greek literature.
Hesiod's father was a merchant who lived at Kyme, on the coast of Asia Minor. The son passed most of his life at Askra, but of his life we know little, of his death a good deal. He had a friend, a citizen of Miletus, who came to stay with him in Greece. The two Ionians travelling together were entertained by one Phegeus, a citizen of Locris. They repaid his hospitality by seducing his daughter: the girl committed suicide, and her brothers, taking the law into their own hands, avenged her ruin by killing both Hesiod and his friend, who indeed was said to have been the chief culprit.
This tale, which is by far the best-authenticated fact in Hesiod's life, does not give us a very pleasant impression as to the poet's capacity for passing judgment on women, and probably the details of the Pandora myth are his own invention. The story itself is very old, but, as told by Hesiod, it has all the sham epic machinery, while it is linked on to the ancient fable of Prometheus.
To revenge the gift of fire to men, Zeus resolves to make a woman. 'I will give them an evil thing,' he says; 'every man in his heart will rejoice therein and hug his own misfortune.' Accordingly, Hephaestus mixes the paste and fashions the doll. Athena gives her skill in weaving, Aphrodite 'sheds charm about her head and baleful desire and passion that eats away the strength of men.' Finally, Hermes gives her 'a dog's shameless mind and thieving ways.' Then the doll is dressed with kirtle and girdle, chains of gold are hung about her body, spring flowers put upon her head, and she is sent down to earth. 'A sheer and hopeless delusion, to be the bane of men who work for their bread.'
Epimetheus takes her to wife, and when he had got her, 'then and then only did he know the evil thing he possessed.' So the tale of Pandora ends, and the story of the Jar, although it comes next in the 'Works and Days,' is not certainly connected with her history. It is 'a woman,' but not necessarily Pandora, who takes the lid from the Jar of Evil Things and lets them fly free over the world, so that only one curse now remains constant.
That curse, it will be remembered, is Elpis---not so much Hope as the gambler's belief in Luck. It is the idea that things must change for the better if you will only risk all your fortune: that the laws[27] of the universe will be providentially altered for your benefit; the belief, in fact, that so often makes the elderly misogynist take a young wife.
Such is Hesiod's attitude towards women, and with Hesiod the first stage of Greek literature comes to an end.
Of the literature of the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, the lyric, iambic and elegiac poetry, we have only inconsiderable fragments. There are two reasons for the disappearance. In the case of the greatest names, Alcus and Sappho, the Romans preferred the adaptations of Horace to the originals. With most of the other poets, the general standard of morality in their verse is so low that they fell under the ban of the Early Church, and as we know---unreasonably enough in her case---Sappho was included with them, and her poems publicly burnt. But in the fragments that we do possess there appears unmistakably the same mixture of sensual desire and cynical distaste for women which disfigures the late Epic; until in this period it ends in sheer misogyny.
In nothing is Aristotle's great doctrine of the golden mean more valuable than in matters of sex. The sexual appetite is as natural as the appetites of eating and drinking; and as necessary for that which is nature's sole concern, the preservation of the species. If the sexual appetite is wholly starved,[29] the result is as disastrous to the race as the total deprivation of food and drink would be to the individual: if it is unduly fostered, Nature revenges herself in the same way as she does upon those who exceed in the matter of food or drink, and abnormal perversities of every kind begin. In sex matters the normal man and woman alone should be considered---the father and the mother of a family---and their opinion alone is of any real value. But unfortunately in literature, and especially in this Ionian literature, the normal person is the exception, and most of the writers we now have to consider seem to have been unmarried and childless.
The paucity of material, probably no great loss either in an artistic or a moral sense, has obscured the facts, but there seems little doubt that in this period literature was definitely used for the first time to degrade the position of women. The iambic metre was invented for the express purpose of satirical calumny, and the three chief iambic poets of the Alexandrian canon, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax, in their scanty fragments all agree on one point: the chief object of their lampoons is---woman. At the beginning of this period the two sexes are fairly equal in their opportunities; at the end the female is plainly the inferior. Sappho and Erinna mark the turning-point in literature. Living at a time when it had not been made impossible for[30] women to write, they showed that a woman could equal or surpass the male poets of her day. The few fragments of Erinna's verse that we possess, e.g., the epigram on the portrait of Agatharchis and the pathetic elegy on the dead Baucis, reveal a talent at least as fine and strong as that of Alcus; while of all the Greek lyrists, Sappho, both in reputation and as far as we can judge in actual achievement, holds by far the highest place.
Later ages, indeed, found it difficult to believe that Sappho was a woman at all. The scandal of male gossip was inspired by a genuine and pathetic belief that such a genius as hers must at least have been touched with masculine vices. But in Sappho's writings, which are our only real evidence, there is nothing distinctively 'mannish': she is neither gross nor tedious. In the technique of her art, metrical skill, the music of verse, she is at least the equal of any poet who has lived since her day; in thought and diction she is far superior to all her contemporaries.
