Upon his own generation Euripides had a profound effect. Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon are all feminists in varying degrees, and a fairly full statement of feminist doctrine may be found in their works. But the idealist did not win the day. It is true that women were never so degraded—in European civilisation at least—after Euripides’ time as they had been before; but his teaching did not bear its full fruit. Aristotle—the supreme type of the practical mind—threw all the weight of his unexampled influence into the other scale, and the Aristotelian view of the natural inferiority of women prevailed: so that the poets of Ionia, libertines and profligates as most of them were, find their work completed by the philosopher of Stagirus. Greek is the source from which most Roman writers drew their inspiration, and although the position of the Roman matron, honoured as the mother of the household, was infinitely higher than that of the too-often childless Athenian wife, there is still an undercurrent of misogyny which permeates Latin literature, and finds its fullest expression in Juvenal. All the venom of earlier writers is collected by the satirist, who adds the bitterness of his own bile, seasoned with the highly-coloured rhetoric which the Romans loved, and finally, with infinite zest, disgorges the mixture in the six hundred lines of the Sixth Satire. But, even as Aristotle sums up the final tendencies of Greek literature, so Juvenal represents almost the last effort of the anti-feminist school at Rome. The Christianity of the East and the romance of the North were already beginning to modify the grosser realism of the Mediterranean world, and towards the end of the second century the reaction came, when the Greek genius gave to the world the last, and perhaps the most fruitful, of all its gifts in literature—the romantic novel. Longus, in the _Daphnis and Chloe_, strikes a new note, and his hero is, perhaps, the first gentleman in matters of the affections that we find in ancient literature. The barbarian invasions soon came to devastate the land, but Longus had sown the seed, and he is the true father of all the love romances of mediæval chivalry. As Nausicaa is the first, so Chloe is almost the last of ancient heroines; and Greek literature, by a curious turn of fate, ironical enough considering its general tendency, ends as it begins, with the praise of the perfect maiden. I.—THE EARLY EPIC Any discussion of Greek literature must begin with Homer, although as regards women and the social position the Epic in its first form stands somewhat aloof from the general current of ancient thought. The Homeric poems are in a very real sense the Greek Bible, for they represent a standard of morality which in many respects is far higher than that which prevailed at Athens in the great era of Greek history, and they picture a state of society very different from the complex civilisation of the city-state.