For so long a time have women been judged by masculine standards, it is not perhaps remarkable that male writers of these later times can discern in the simplicity and chastity existing among the Dorians, in the age of Lycurgus, no evidence of a former era of female independence. Neither is it singular, as for so many ages women have been subject to the pleasure and control of the opposite sex, that we should be repeatedly told by writers who have dealt with the usages of the Spartans, that their women were “permitted” to do this, and “allowed” to do that, although the facts in the case prove that in all their movements they were guided by their own wills, exercised either directly, or through the oracles of the gods. When the customs of the ancient Dorians are viewed without prejudice, the fact will doubtless be observed that they originated not in a depraved and licentious state of society, but, on the contrary, that they were the direct result of that freedom of action which characterizes purity of life and a high standard of thought and action. CHAPTER IV ATHENIAN WOMEN According to Wilford, the Greeks were the descendants of the Yavanas of India. This writer observes that the Pandits insist that the words _Yavana_ and _Yoni_ are derived from the same root, _Yu_, and that when the Ionians emigrated they adopted this name to distinguish themselves as adorers of the female, in opposition to a strong sect of male worshippers which had been driven from the mother country.[224] Under the constantly increasing importance of the male, however, both in human affairs and in the god-idea, they subsequently became ashamed of their religious title and sought to abandon it. Of the aversion felt in Greece for this name Herodotus says: [224] See Hargrave Jennings, _Phallicism_. The Athenians and most of the Ionic states over the world went so far in their dislike of the name as actually to lay it aside; and even at the present day the greater number of them seems to me to be ashamed of it.[225] [225] Book i. Whenever in early historic times a country was subjugated, the conquerors either murdered or enslaved the men, and utilized the women for wives, or sexual slaves. The Ionians who, according to Herodotus, sailed from Attica, without women, took for wives native Carians whose fathers they had slain; hence these captives made a law, which they bound themselves by an oath to observe, and which they handed down to their daughters after them, that “none should ever sit at meat with her husband, or call him by his name; because the invaders slew their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and then forced them to become their wives.”[226] The terms of the oaths sworn by them at the time of the capture seem, subsequently, to have been enforced by their imperious masters. [226] Book i.