Women of Early Christianity Part 18

Athens was finally chosen as the seat of the new Greek government; and in 1837 the Bavarian king Otho and his lovely bride, the princess Amalia, entered Athens in triumph, and the kingdom of h.e.l.las was fairly launched. Within the memory of living men the dynasty of Otho fell, and a scion of the royal house of Denmark, King George, with his Russian consort, Queen Olga, now holds sway in Athens.

The modern Greek woman of the higher cla.s.ses has become so thoroughly cosmopolitan in her culture that she has lost in large measure her distinctive traits. Her sympathy is rather with Parisian life than with English, though her deportment is marked by a sobriety of manner partaking rather of Greek repose than of French effusion. Many faces seen in Greek lands exhibit, in profile especially, the Greek type of beauty.

The women of the lower cla.s.ses, no doubt, preserve many of the characteristics of the race in all ages, in spite of the intermingling with foreign peoples and the results of centuries of Turkish oppression, which time alone can eradicate. Domestic fidelity, maternal affection, devotion to religious observances, the cheerful discharge of the duties and responsibilities of wedded life, are nowhere more beautifully ill.u.s.trated than among the Greek women of to-day.

It is the Christian religion which makes the life of Greek women under King George superior to that of their sisters under the dominion of the Sultan, and we may hope that in the fulness of time the Greek women of Europe and Asia outside of the h.e.l.lenic kingdom may enjoy, untrammelled by Turkish authority, the rights and privileges of that religion which has elevated the s.e.x, and that the Greek woman of the future may combine the personal graces of her sister in antiquity with the cultivation of the soul and the enlargement of spirit which comes to women with the inculcation of Christianity.