idleness and extravagance, is proof that light is breaking
in the East. If we can profit by the good that was in Greece and avoid
the bad, we have the raw material here, if properly used, to make her
glory fade into forgetfulness by comparison.

Do not ask that the days of Greece shall come again--we now know that to
live by the sword is to die by the sword, and the nation that builds on
conquest builds on sand. We want no splendor fashioned by slaves--no
labor driven by the lash, nor lured on through superstitious threat of
punishment and offer of reward: we recognize that to own slaves is to be
one.

Ten men built Athens. The passion for beauty that these men had may be
ours, their example may inspire us, but to live their lives--we will
none of them! Our lives are better--the best time the world has ever
seen is now; and a better yet is sure to be. The night is past and
gone--the light is breaking in the East!

* * * * *

Womanhood was not held in high esteem in Greece. To be sure, barbaric
Sparta made a bold stand for equality, and almost instituted a
gynecocracy, but the usual idea was that a woman's opinion was not worth
considering. Hence the caricaturists of the day made sly sport of the
love of Pericles and Aspasia. These two were intellectual equals,
comrades; and that all of Pericles' public speeches were rehearsed to
her, as his enemies averred, is probably true. "Aspasia has no time for
society; she is busy writing a speech for her lord," said Aristophanes.
Socrates used to visit Aspasia, and he gave it out as his opinion that
Aspasia wrote the sublime ode delivered by Pericles on the occasion of
his eulogy on the Athenian dead. The popular mind could not possibly
comprehend how a great man could defer to a woman in important matters,
and she be at once his wife, counselor, comrade, friend. Socrates, who
had been taught by antithesis, understood it.

The best minds of our day behold that Pericles was as sublimely great in
his love-affairs as he was in his work as architect and statesman. Life
is a whole, and every man works his love up into life--his life is
revealed in his work, and his love is mirrored in his life. For myself I
can not see why the Parthenon may not have been a monument to a great
and sublime passion, and the statue of Athena, its chief ornament, be
the sacred symbol of a great woman greatly loved.

So far as can be found, the term of "courtesan" applie