ondition among Ionians, whose representative is
Athens. The girls learned only to spin, weave and sew, at the most a
little reading and writing. They were practically shut in and had only
the company of other women.

The women's room formed a separate part of the house, on the upper floor
or in a rear building, where men, especially strangers, did not easily
enter and whither the women retreated when male visitors came. The
women did not leave the house without being accompanied by a female
slave. At home they were strictly guarded. Aristophanes speaks of
Molossian dogs that were kept to frighten off adulterers. And at least
in the Asiatic towns, eunuchs were kept for guarding women. Even at
Herodotus' time these eunuchs were manufactured for the trade, and
according to Wachsmuth not for barbarians alone. By Euripides woman is
designated as "oikurema," a neuter signifying an object for
housekeeping, and beside the business of breeding children she served to
the Athenian for nothing but his chief house maid. The man had his
gymnastic exercises, his public meetings, from which the women were
excluded. Besides, the man very often had female slaves at his disposal,
and during the most flourishing time of Athens an extensive prostitution
which was at least patronized by the state. It was precisely on the
basis of this prostitution that the unique type of Ionic women
developed; the hetaerae. They rose by esprit and artistic taste as far
above the general level of antique womanhood as the Spartan women by
their character. But that it was necessary to become a hetaera before
one could be a woman, constitutes the severest denunciation of the
Athenian family.

The Athenian family became in the course of time the model after which
not only the rest of the Ionians, but gradually all the Greeks at home
and abroad molded their domestic relations. Nevertheless, in spite of
all seclusion and watching, the Grecian ladies found sufficient
opportunity for deceiving their husbands. The latter who would have been
ashamed of betraying any love for their wives, found recreation in all
kinds of love affairs with hetaerae. But the degradation of the women
was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the
abomination of boy-love. They degraded their gods and themselves by the
myth of Ganymedes.

Such was the origin of monogamy, as far as we may trace it in the most
civilized and most highly developed nation of antiquity.