orically the first who washed household linen in
public, was, when so engaged, surprised by the shipwrecked hero. Instead
of being alarmed at the appearance of this man whom the waters had
disrobed, she was conscious only of a deep respect. St. Basilius gives the
reason. In default of clothing Homer had dressed him in virtue.[6]

The deduction is so pleasant that the views of the saint concerning Circe
and Calypso would be of interest. But they are unrecorded. It may be that
he had none. The enchantresses themselves with their philters and
enthralments are supposedly fabulous. Yet in the Homeric account of their
seas, once thought to be but a dream of fairyland, mariners have found a
log book of Mediterranean facts so accurate that a pilot's guide is but a
prose rendering of its indications.[7] As with the seas so with the
sirens. Their enchantments were real.

At an epoch when women generally were but things, too passively
indifferent and too respectfully obedient to care to attempt, even could
they have divined how, to captivate, Circe and Calypso displayed the then
novel lures of coquetry and fascination. In the charm of their voices, in
the grace of their manners, in the harmony of their dress, in the perfume
of their lips, in their use of unguents, in their desire to please joined
to the high art of it, was a subtlety of seduction so new and unimagined
that it was magical indeed. In the violent _Iliad_, women, hunted like
game, were but booty. In the suaver _Odyssey_ was their revenge. It was
they who captured and detained, reducing the hardiest heroes into servants
of their pleasure. It is reasonable that their islands should have been
thought enchanted and they enchantresses.

The story of their spells, of their refinements, and of their consequent
dominations, exerted gradually an influence wide and profound. Women began
to conjecture something else than marriage by right of might. Into the
conjecturings came attempts at emancipation that preoccupied husbands and
moralists. Hesiod denounced the new ambitions, and, finding denunciation
perhaps ineffective, employed irony. He told of Pandora who, fashioned
first out of clay, afterward adorned with a parure of beauty, was then
given perfidy, falsehood and ruse, that, in being a delight to man, she
should be also a disaster.[8]

The picture, interesting in its suggestion of Eve, was originally perhaps
a Chaldaean curio, imported by Phoenician traders. Its first He