An attentive study of the Greek and Roman literatures furnishes many illustrations of the remark just made, that men who degrade women deride them. Among the Greeks, who kept women in subjection and seclusion, and gave them no freedom of choice in matters of dearest concern to them, the foibles of the sex were treated very much as they now are by the dissolute caricaturists of Paris. Aristophanes's mode of representing the women of Athens is eminently Gavarnian; and nothing was more natural than that an Aristophanes should come after an Anacreon. The lyric poet depicts women as objects of desire, superior in alluring charm even to wine, rosy wine; and Aristophanes delights to exhibit the women's apartment of an Athenian house as a riotous and sensualized harem. How many expressions of utter distrust and dislike of women occur in the Greek poets! "For this, and only this, I'll trust a woman, That if you take life from her she will die; And, being dead, will come to life no more. In all things else I am an infidel." Thus Antiphanes, who died twenty-two hundred years before Gavarni was born. Menander justifies the gods for tormenting Prometheus, though his crime was only stealing a spark of fire. "But, O ye gods, how infinite the mischief! That little spark gave being to a woman, And let in a new race of plagues to curse us." The well-known epigram of Palladas upon marriage expresses a thought which has been uttered by satirists in every form of which language is capable: "In marriage are two happy things allowed-- A wife in wedding garb and in her shroud. Who, then, dares say that state can be accurst Where the last day's as happy as the first?" [Illustration: _She._ "Now, understand me. To-morrow morning he will ask you to dinner. If he has his umbrella with him, it will mean that he has not got his stall at the theatre. In that case, don't accept. If he has no umbrella, come to dinner." _He._ "But (you know we must think of every thing) suppose it should rain to-morrow morning?" _She._ "If it rains, he will get wet--that's all. If I don't want him to have an umbrella, he won't have one. How silly you are!"--GAVARNI, _Fourberies de Femmes, Paris, 1846_.]