a suit
for her recovery, force her from her husband's arms, and make her his
wife.

Such a law must, alone, have been fatal to that domestic purity which we
justly consider the basis of social happiness--the very word, [Greek:
hetairai], which the Athenians enjoyed to denote the most degraded of all
women, if it proves the exquisite refinement of that wonderful people,
serves also to show how different were the associations with which, among
them, that class was connected. Can we wonder at this? Under that glorious
heaven, such women might, when they chose, behold the statues of Phidias
and the pictures of Zeuxis; they could listen to the wisdom of Socrates,
or they might form part of the crowd, hushed in raptured silence, round
the rhapsodist, as he recited the immortal lines of Homer--or round
Demosthenes, as he poured upon a rival, worthy of himself, the burning
torrent of his more than human eloquence.

In their hearing the mightiest interests were discussed--the subtle
questions of the Academy propounded--the snares of the sophist
exposed--the sublime thoughts and actions of heroes and demigods,
embodied in the most glorious poetry, were daily exhibited to their view;
while the wife, occupied solely with petty cares and trifling objects,
without charms to win the love, or dignity to command the esteem, of her
husband, was condemned, within the narrow walls of the Gynaeceum, (of
which the drawings of Herculaneum and Pompeii may enable us to form some
notion,) to drag out the insipid round of her monotonous existence.

True the Hetairai were stigmatized by law--but, as opinion was on their
side, they might well submit to legal condemnation and formal censure,
when they saw every day the youth, the intellect, the eloquence, the
philosophy, and the dignity of Athens crowding round their feet. At Rome,
the wife was not subject to the same rigorous seclusion, she was not cut
off from all possibility of improvement; her influence was gradually felt,
her rights were tacitly extended, and long after the letter of the law
reduced her to the condition of a slave, she held and exercised the
privileges of a citizen. At Rome, domestic virtues were more considered,
domestic ties were held in great esteem. The family was the basis of the
state. The existence of the Roman was not altogether public, it was not
merely intellectual; in what Grecian poet after Homer shall we find lines
that convey such an idea of domestic happiness a