And the strength and freshness of body produce a sweetness of temper and a soundness of mind which act like a charm on all the men who have to do with them. It seems to me that this explains to some extent the phenomena of the Homeric poems. There is no vicious woman in the ‘Iliad’ or ‘Odyssey.’ Some of them have committed glaring violations of the ordinary rules of life, but they are merely temporary aberrations or fits of madness. And there is no prostitution. This healthiness explains also another feature of the Homeric women which deserves notice. There was an extraordinary number of very beautiful women. The district of Thessaly, from which the whole of Greece ultimately derived its own name of Hellas, is characterized by the epithet the land of the beautiful women; and several other places are so characterized. But their type of beauty was not the type prevalent in modern times. Health was the first condition of beauty. The beautiful woman was well proportioned in every feature and limb. It was the grace and harmony of every part that constituted beauty. Hence, height was regarded as an essential requisite. Helen is taller than all her companions. The commanding stature impressed the Greeks as being a near approach to the august forms of the goddesses. As one might expect, the beauty of the women is not confined to the young girl between the ages of seventeen and twenty. A Homeric woman remained beautiful for a generation or two. Helen was, in the eye of the Greek, as beautiful at forty or fifty as she was at twenty, and probably as attractive, if not more so. The Homeric Greek admired the full-developed woman as much as the growing girl. Such, then, were these Homeric Greek women. The Greek race was the finest race that ever existed in respect of physical development and intellectual power. Do we not see, in the account that Homer gives of the women, something like an explanation of the phenomenon? A race of healthy, finely formed women is the natural antecedent to a race of men possessed of a high physical and intellectual organization. CHAPTER III. THE SPARTAN WOMEN.