It is not to be borne, ye wayward race; Is this your best, is this the aid you lend The State, the fortitude with which you steel The souls of the besieged, thus falling down Before these images to wail, and shriek With lamentations loud? Wisdom abhors you. Nor in misfortune, nor in dear success, Be woman my associate. If her power Bears sway, her insolence exceeds all bounds, But if she fears, woe to that house and city. And now, by holding counsel with weak fear, You magnify the foe, and turn our men To flight: thus are we ruined by ourselves. This ever will arise from suffering women To intermix with men. But mark me well, Whoe’er henceforth dares disobey my orders, Be it man or woman, old or young, Vengeance shall burst upon him, the decree Stands irreversible, and he shall die. War is no female province, but the scene For men: hence home; nor spread your mischiefs here, Hear you, or not? Or speak I to the deaf?[173] [173] _The Seven Chiefs against Thebes._ From this scene pictured by Æschylus five centuries and a quarter B.C., let us return to the siege of Troy, three centuries earlier, and listen to Homer. During the thickest of the fight Helenus, approaching Eneas and Hector, his brother, thus addresses the latter: But, Hector, thou depart To Troy and seek the mother of us both And bid her call the honoured Trojan dames, that at the fane of Pallas they may supplicate for mercy in behalf of the wives and little ones of the defenders of Troy. Whereupon the noble Hector calls aloud: O valiant sons of Troy, and ye allies Summoned from far! Be men, my friends; call back Your wonted valour, while I go to Troy To ask the aged men, our counselors, And all our wives, to come before the gods And pray and offer sacrifice.[174] [174] _The Iliad_, book vi., Bryant’s translation. After referring to the generally conceded fact that in Europe the spread of civilization has been commensurate with the influence exercised by women, Mr. Buckle expresses himself as being unable to account for the seeming inconsistencies which are presented by a comparison of the position occupied in Greece by the women of Homer’s time, and that as pictured by the laws, usages, and social customs in the age of Plato and his contemporaries. Although the Greeks during the ages which intervened between Homer and Plato had made many notable improvements in the arts of life, and in various branches of speculative and practical knowledge, women had evidently lost ground, “their influence being less than it was in the earlier and more barbarous period depicted by Homer.”[175] [175] _The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge._