could have no truer indication than this as to
the degradation into which woman had fallen in the sexual
relationship.

That once, indeed, it had been far otherwise with the Athenian women
the ancient legends witness. Athens was the city of Pallas Athene, the
goddess of strength and power, which in itself testifies to a time
when women were held in honour. The Temple of the Goddess, high on the
Acropolis, stood as a relic of matriarchal worship. Year by year the
secluded women of Athens wove a robe for Athene. Yet, so complete had
become their subjection and their withdrawal from the duties of
citizens, that when in the Theatre of Dyonysus men actors personated
the great traditional women of the Greek Heroic Age, no woman was
permitted to be present.[278] What wonder, then, that the Athenian
women rebelled against the wastage of their womanhood. That they did
rebel we may be certain on the strength of the satirical statements of
Aristophanes, and even more from the pathos of the words put here and
there into the mouths of women by Euripides--

"Of all things upon earth that breathe and grow
A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day
To buy us some man's love, and lo, they bring
A Master of our flesh. There comes the sting
Of the whole shame."[279]

The debased position of the Athenian citizen woman becomes abundantly
clear when we find that ideal love and free relationship between the
sexes were possible only with the _hetairae_. Limitation of space
forbids my giving any adequate details of these stranger-women, who
were the beloved companions of the Athenian men. Prohibited from legal
marriage by law, these women were in all other respects free; their
relations with men, either temporary or permanent, were openly
entered into and treated with respect. For the Greeks the _hetaira_
was in no sense a prostitute. The name meant friend and companion. The
women to whom the name was applied held an honourable and independent
position, one, indeed, of much truer honour than that of the wife.

These facts may well give us pause. It was not the women who were the
legal wives, safeguarded to ensure their chastity, restricted to their
physical function of procreation, but the _hetairae_, says Donaldson,
"who exhibited what was best and noblest in woman's nature."
Xenophon's ideal wife was a good housekeeper--like her of the
Proverbs. Thucydides in the famous