Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/121

 Rh carefully weighed. These more particularly affect and condemn the Russian woman. As foreign witnesses saw her, she is a monster. Into this closer inquiry must be made.

The position imposed on man's partner by Muscovite customs and legislation was certainly not affected by racial influences. The terem, as all men know nowadays, was not of Eastern origin. In it we recognise, under a Tartar name, the Greco-Roman gynæceum, dressed up Byzantine fashion. Nor can the general tendencies of the Slav race be blamed; they rather leant towards giving women a privileged position. Most of the Slav laws, unlike those of Rome, Germany, or Scandinavia, reject the idea that woman is an inferior being, placed under the permanent guardianship of her male relations, or assimilated to things of which they have the arbitrary disposal. In Russia, according to the code of Jaroslav, the indemnity due for murder (the glovchtchizna, price of the head) was higher when the murdered person was a woman, and even according to Ivan IV.'s code, both sexes were equal before the law. It was not till 1557 that it occurred to the Terrible to attack this principle by deciding that any clause whereby a wife willed the management of her property away to her husband was invalid. 'What the husband orders, the wife writes'—so runs the preamble of the new law. But this is a mere acknowledgment of a fact, and a precaution taken in the wife's interest, rather than a decree of forfeiture.

Whether or not it should be attributed, as the learned historian of Slav law, Maciejowski, holds, to her participation in the duties of the priesthood in ancient Slav communities, or to some other and more authentic cause (for the equality in priestly matters itself looks like a result), Eve's comparative triumph, even on Russian soil, is not open to any doubt. But in Russia Byzantium set on this primordial fact the seal of her own very different conceptions, largely borrowed from pagan teachings. The Constantinopolitan compilers had carefully noted the aphorism ascribed to Solon—'The wise man thanks the gods daily for having made him a Greek and not a barbarian, a man and not a beast, a male and not a female.' They had further noted that Aristotle gave the citizen full power over children, slaves, and women, and they industriously amalgamated these precepts with their Christian notions as to damnation and the origin of sin.

'What is a woman?' we read in an ancient religious instruction imported into Russia from the East. 'A net to tempt men! with her clear face and her high-set eyes, she works