When we pass from Homer, we enter a new region. We do not know how far Homer’s characters are historical. We cannot doubt that the manners and ways of the men and women whom he describes were like those of the real men and women amongst whom he lived. He may have idealized a little, but even his idealizations are indicative of the current of his age. But we know little of the modes in which the various States of Greece were constituted, and of the relations which subsisted between them. We have to pass over a long period which is a practical blank, and then we come to historical Greece. In historical Greece we have no unity of the Greek nation. We have men of Greek blood, but these men did not dream of forming themselves into one nation, ruled by the same laws, and mutually helpful of each other. The Greek mind regarded the city as the greatest political organization possible, or at any rate compatible with the adequate discharge of the functions of a State. And accordingly if we could give a full account of woman in Greece, we should have to detail the arrangements made in each particular State. There are no materials for such an account if we wished to give it; but even if there had been, it is probable that we should not have learned much more than we learn from the histories of the two most prominent of those States, Sparta and Athens. It is to the position and influence of women in these States that we must turn our attention. To form anything like a just conception of the Spartan State, we must keep clearly in view the notion which the ancients generally and the Spartans in particular had of a State. The ancients were strongly impressed with the decay and mortality of the individual man; but they felt equally strongly the perpetuity of the race through the succession of one generation after another. Accordingly, when a State was formed, the most prominent idea that pervaded all legislation was the permanence of the State, and the continuance of the worship of the gods. They paid little regard to individual wishes. They thought little of individual freedom. The individual was for the State, not the State for the individual, and accordingly all private and personal considerations must be sacrificed without hesitation to the strength and permanence of the State. A peculiar turn was given to this idea in Sparta.