Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/404

 388 HISTORY OF GREECE. which he was disposed to use to the advantage of his daughter over his son. In conjunction with this last circumstance, we have to notice that peculiar sympathy and yielding disposition towards women in the Spartan mind, of which Aristotle also speaks, 1 and which he ascribes to the warlike temper both of the citizen and the state, Ares bearing the yoke of Aphrodite. But, apart from such a consideration, if we suppose, on the part of a wealthy Spartan father, the simple disposition to treat sons and daughters alike as to bequest, nearly one half of the in- herited mass of property would naturally be found in the hands of the daughters, since on an average of families the number of the two sexes born is nearly equal. In most societies, it is the men who make new acquisitions : but this seldom or never hap- pened with Spartan men, who disdained all money-getting occu- pations. Xenophon, a warm panegyrist of Spartan manners, points with Borne pride to the tall and vigorous breed of citizens which the Lykurgic institutions had produced. The beauty of the Lacedae- monian women was notorious throughout Greece, and Lampito, the Lacedaemonian woman introduced in the Lysistrata of Aris- tophanes, is made to receive from the Athenian women the loud- est compliments upon her fine shape and masculine vigor. 3 We may remark that, on this as well as on the other points, Xeno- phon emphatically insists on the peculiarity of Spartan institu- tions, contradicting thus the views of those who regard them merely as something a little Hyper-Dorian. Indeed, such pecu- liarity seems never to have been questioned in antiquity, either by the enemies or by the admirers of Sparta. And those who censured the public masculine exercises of the Spartan maidens, as well as the liberty tolerated in married women, al- lowed at the same time that the feelings of both were actively identified with the state to a degree hardly known in Greece ; that the patriotism of the. men gi-eatly depended upon the sym- pathy of the other sex, which manifested itself publicly, in a 1 Aristot. Polit. ii. 6, 6 ; Plutarch, Agis, c. 4. rovf A.OKe6aifioviwf K<ITTJKU ovf 6vraf uel ruv yvvaiKuv, Kal xfalov tueivais ruv Sqftoatuv, % ruv 16'tut irotf, iroTivirpayfiovElv Sifio
 * Aristophan Lysistr. 80.