But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of his race. He saw plainly--what we might have expected the more scientific Aristotle to see--that woman's frailer power of reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato as saying that "the female sex is inferior to the male," and represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only, and not on women, and he presently adds: "The same education which makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same."[5] There are differences between men and women, but he says that these differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so solid is his conviction of woman's capacity. In a word, one of the greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed. What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade both men and women turn from such political life as was left in Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era), held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of woman's position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of Hypatia--not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria. In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and, much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman's position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the spacious tomb of old empires.