Nothing objectionable
was seen in that. The names and fame of these hetairae, who held
intimate intercourse with the leading men of Greece, and participated in
their learned discourses, as well as in their revels, has come down to
our own days; whereas the names of the legitimate wives are mostly
forgotten and lost. Thus the handsome Aspasia was the intimate friend of
the celebrated Pericles, who later made her his legitimate wife; the
name of Phryne became in later days the generic designation of those
women that were to be had for money. Phryne held intimate relations with
Hyperides, and she stood for Praxiteles, one of the first sculptors of
Greece, as the model for his Aphrodite. Danae was the sweetheart of
Epicurus, Archeanassa that of Plato. Other celebrated hetairae, whose
names have reached our days, were Lais of Corinth, Gnathanea, etc. There
is no celebrated Greek, who had no intercourse with hetairae. It
belonged to the style of life of distinguished Greeks. Demosthenes, the
great orator, described in his oration against Neara, the sexual life of
the rich men of Athens in these words: "_We marry a woman in order to
obtain legitimate children, and to have a faithful warder in the house;
we keep concubines for our service and daily care; and hetairae for the
enjoyment of love._" The wife was, accordingly, only an apparatus for
the production of children; a faithful dog, that watched the house. The
master of the house, on the contrary, lived according to his _bon
plaisir_, as he willed.

In order to satisfy the demand for venal women, particularly with
younger males, there arose that which was unknown under the rule of the
mother-right,--_prostitution_. Prostitution distinguishes itself from
the free sexual intercourse that customs and social institutions
rendered a matter of course under primitive conditions, and,
accordingly, freed from objectionableness, in that the woman sells her
body, either to one man or to several, for material benefit.
Prostitution, therefore, exists so soon as woman makes a trade of her
charms. Solon, who formulated the new law for Athens, and is,
consequently, esteemed the founder of the new legal status, was also the
founder of the public houses for women, the "deikterion,"--official
houses of prostitution--, and the price to all the customers was the
same. According to Philemon it amounted to one obolus, about four cents
of our money. Like the temples with the Greeks and Romans, an