Woman in the Golden Ages
9781465678102
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“The majority of men, and especially of women, whose imagination is double, cannot live without a faith,” said the Abbé Galiani, “and those who can, sustain the effort only in the greatest force and youth of the soul.” How far this may be true it is needless to discuss here, but it is certain enough that women have been the strongest agents in the religious movements of the world. A tender heart may go with a skeptical mind, but the fine type of womanhood, in which reason is tempered with love and imagination, inevitably turns to some faith for support in seasons of moral decadence as in moments of sorrow and despair. This has never had a more striking illustration than in the reaction of a large class of Roman women from the vices, follies, and debasing pleasures of a civilization falling into ruin, toward an extreme asceticism. At this moment in its history the golden age of Rome was long past, and the world was to wait more than a thousand years for another brilliant flowering of the human intellect on the same soil. But glory of a different sort set its seal upon the women of the darkening ages. To the enthusiasms of patriotism and passion, culture and ambition, succeeded the enthusiasms of religion. In the fourth century the images of the pagan gods, white and silent on their stone pedestals, still kept guard over the city. Their temples were comparatively fresh, but the gods themselves were dead. The seventy thousand statues that made Rome a forest of marbles in the days of its glory had not lost their majesty, their beauty, or their grace; but the spirit which had made them alive had gone with their virgin purity. Pan held his flute as of old, but it was mute. Bacchus still wore his vine-leaves and his air of rollicking mirth, but the bands of roistering men who had once paid him homage no longer cared for a god to preside over their plain worship of the senses. Venus had taken off her divine halo and gone back to the foam of the sea whence she came, leaving only the smiling face of a beautiful woman. The Muses had ceased to dance to the lyre of Apollo, and the god of light was asleep like the rest. Men and women had thrown aside the thin veil of idealism with which they had once invested their sins, and Rome was become a sink of iniquity without even the leaven of the Hellenic imagination. Between a life of the senses and a life of the intellect, it gravitated from a wild orgy to a passionless philosophy that held its own pulse and counted its own heart-beats as it drifted curiously and mockingly into the unknown. But women do not carry easily the burden of a cold skepticism, and philosophy failed to satisfy them. When the age became hopelessly corrupt, and men scoffed at morals, sending one another to death for inconvenient virtues, they had been swept along with the current, and many plunged into a life of the senses with the recklessness of an ardent, virile temperament. But there was still a large number of intelligent matrons who preserved the waning traditions of an educated womanhood, and these revolted at the hopeless vacuum of a life devoted to intrigue and the tiresome mysteries of the toilet. The jewels, silks, and embroidered gauzes of fabulous cost had no more charm for them. Nor did they care to please the curled and perfumed sybarites who gambled or discussed the last bit of scandal in their pillared halls, fanned by slaves, and crying out at the crumple of a rose-leaf. The Roman women had been distinguished for the stronger qualities of character. Their bounding energies had been shown in deeds of heroism. They had to a large degree the ardors of the imagination. These traits, together with the moral sense that lies at the base of the feminine nature, though often submerged for a time, vindicated themselves in the passionate devotion with which so many turned from a beautiful but bad world toward things of the spirit.
