Such were these Spartan women for many generations. No word of reproach can be brought against them. It is true that the free intercourse of the young men with the young women and the slightness of the female garments shocked the ordinary Athenian, and expressions to this effect occur in some writers, especially Euripides.[28] But the general purity of the Spartan women is guaranteed by all the principal writers who have discussed the constitution of Sparta as it was during its supremacy--by Plato,[29] Xenophon, and Plutarch. No doubt the system laboured under a radical defect. It was exclusive. It drove away all strangers; it discouraged the higher culture at least in the case of the men; and it suspected all the higher arts as tending to luxury. And when the crisis came and the old manners gave way, vice and weakness rushed in, and men and women became equally bad. It is in the latter period that the words of blame are heard. Plato justly criticizes one marked defect in the Spartan treatment of women. The lawgiver had looked on woman only as a mother. He had lost sight of every other function. But women cannot spend their whole lives as mothers. When their infants grew into boyhood they were handed over to the instruction of Spartan men. And then what function had the women to discharge? Lycurgus, or the Spartan law-givers, took no thought of this. The men were under strict regulation to the end of their days. They dined together on the fare prescribed by the State. They were continually out on military service. They had other employments assigned to them. But no regulations were made for the women. They might live as they liked; there was nothing to restrain their luxury, and they were not taught the military art like the men. This neglect of the half of the city, Aristotle affirms, was followed by dire consequences. In his day the Spartan women were incorrigible and luxurious. He also affirms that the Spartan system threw a great deal of land into the hands of the women, so that they possessed two-fifths of it; and finally he accuses the Spartan women of ruling their husbands. Warlike men, he thinks, are apt to be passionately fond of the society of women. “And what difference,” he says,[30] “does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by the women? for the result is the same.” There seems to have been some truth in this last accusation. Many of the wives were better educated than their husbands, and the fact was noticed by others. “You of Lacedæmon,” said a strange lady to Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, “are the only women in the world that rule the men.” “We,” she replied, “are the only women that bring forth men.” There is a great deal of point in what Gorgo said. If women bring forth and rear _men_, they are certain to receive from them respect and tenderness, for there is no surer test of a man’s real manhood than his love for all that is noblest, highest, and truest in