And this leads us to consider another remarkable feature of the Greek character,—its peculiar aptitude for friendship. No country’s history and traditions abound with so many examples of this virtue as those of Greece. In truth, it was there regarded as the most unequivocal mark of an heroic and generous nature, being wholly inconsistent with anything base, sordid, or ignoble, and flourishing only in company with virtues rarest and most difficult of acquisition. Poetry, no doubt, has clad the friendship of heroic times with a splendour scarcely belonging to real life, but the experience of history warrants us in making but slight deductions. Nature in those ages appeared to delight in producing men in pairs, each suited to be the ornament and solace of the other, possessing different qualities, imperfect when apart, but complete, united. Men thus constituted were a sort of moral twins, an extension, if we may so speak, of unity, the same yet different, bringing two souls under the yoke of one will, desiring the same, hating the same, possessing the same, valuing life and the gifts of life only as they were shared in common, seeking adventures, facing dangers together, conforming their thoughts, opinions, feelings, each to the other, having no distinct interest, no distinct hope, but engrafting two lives on the chances of one man’s fortune, and both perishing by the same blow. This feeling has by some been supposed to have owed its strength, in part at least, to the degraded position of women in society; a subject on which I shall have more to say hereafter, but may here remark that such an opinion is wholly incompatible with an impartial interpretation of the Homeric poems and the older traditions of Greece. Throughout fabulous times women are the prime movers in all great events; and the respect which as mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters they received, though expressed in uncourtly language, was perhaps as great as has ever been paid them in any age or country. Every distinguished woman in Homer is the centre of a circle of tender and touching associations. We behold them beloved by their relatives, honoured by their dependants, enjoying every decent freedom, every becoming pleasure, with all the influence and authority appertaining to their sex. Thus Helen, both before and after her fall, is entire mistress of her house, and treated with all possible deference and delicacy: so Hecuba, Andromache, Penelope, Arete, Nausicaa, and Iphigeneia in their respective positions, are held in the highest esteem, and command as great a share of love from those whose duty it was to love and honour them, as any other women in history or fiction. Nor were due respect and tenderness confined to the high and the noble; for innumerable proofs occur in Homer that even among the humblest ranks, that delicate self-respect which is shown by respect to our other self, and may be regarded as the pivot of civilisation, was