An illustration of the state of public morals in ancient Sparta may be observed in the following dialogue. A stranger once asked a Spartan what penalty their law attached to adultery. The reply was: “My friend, there are no adulterers in our country.” Upon being further interrogated, “But what if there should be one?” the Spartan replied: “Why then, he must forfeit a bull so large that he might drink of the Eurotus from the top of Mount Taygetus.” When the stranger asked: “How can such a bull be found?” the man answered with a smile, “How can an adulterer be found in Sparta?”[211] [211] Plutarch’s _Lycurgus_. Commenting on the relative position of Doric and Athenian women, C. O. Müller says: The domestic relation of the wife to her husband among the Dorians was in general the same as that of the ancient western nation, described by Homer as universal among the Greeks, and which existed at Rome till a late period; the only difference being that the peculiarities of the custom were preserved by the Dorians more strictly than elsewhere. Amongst the Dorians of Sparta, the wife was honoured by her husband with the title of mistress (a gallantry belonging to the north of Greece, and also practised by the Thessalians), which was used neither ironically nor unmeaningly. Nay, so strange did the importance which the Lacedæmonian women enjoy, and the influence which they exercised as the managers of their household, and mothers of families, appear to the Greeks, at a time when the prevalence of Athenian manners prevented a due consideration for national customs, that Aristotle supposed Lycurgus to have attempted, but without success, to regulate the lives of women as he had regulated that of the men; and the Spartans were frequently censured for submitting to the yoke of their wives. It has been truly said that nowhere else in Greece do we find traces of that power exercised by women over their sons when arrived at manhood observed among Spartan mothers. When a woman of another country said to Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, “You of Lacedæmon are the only women in the world that rule the men,” she replied, “We are the only women that bring forth men.”[212] [212] Plutarch’s _Lycurgus_. With our present knowledge respecting the influence and independence of the Spartan women, it is folly for certain writers to assert that married women were confined within the house and that only virgins appeared in public. There is some evidence going to prove that at Crete, at Sparta, and at Olympia, women were not only spectators at the Olympian games, but that they engaged personally in the chariot contests. According to an inscription in Della Cella, it is shown that women presided over the public gymnastic exercises in that town.