caring not for them, for their sweets merely, eager to get all he could as
quickly as he might, smacking his faunesque lips over the grape,
staggering with a hiccough along the lanes of love, trailing among them
strophes to Bacchus rather than to Eros, yet managing to combine the two
and leaving finally to the world that chord with its notes of pleasure.

These, mounting behind Sappho's songs, spread through Hellas, creating as
they spread a caste that borrowed from the girl her freedom, from the bard
his wit, and, from the fusion, produced the hetaira.

Hetaira is a term which Sappho applied to her pupils. It means comrade.
But either because it was too elusive for history's detention or too
fragile for its care, it became corrupted, shoved roughly by stupid hands
among the pornai. The latter were the hierodules of Aphrodite Pandemos.
The hetairae were objects of art, patiently fashioned in fastidious
convents, a class of highly educated young women to whom marriage did not
necessarily appeal but to whom liberty was essential, girls "pleasanter,"
Amphis said, "than the wife, for she with the law on her side, can sit in
your house and despise you."

Such an attitude is not enticing. The hetairae were an alterative from it,
and, at the same time, a protest against existing feminine conditions.
These conditions the legislature could not change but the protest the
legislature could and did encourage. While the wife sat contemptuous in
the severe gynaeceum, the hetairae mingled with men, charming them always,
marrying them occasionally, yet only when their own equality and
independence was recognized and conserved.

It was into a union of this kind that Pericles entered with Aspasia. He
never regretted it, though history has affected to regard it as illicit,
and Aspasia as Omphale. The affectation is an injustice. "In all things,"
Pericles said, "a man's life should be as clean as his hands." What
Aspasia said is not recorded. But it is not improbable that she inspired
the remark.

Aspasia was born and educated at Miletus. It was chiefly there and at
Corinth that the hetairae were trained. In these cities, seminaries had
been established where girls rose from studies as serious as those which
the practice of other liberal professions comport. Their instruction
comprised everything that concerned the perfectioning of the body and
everything that related to the embellishment of the mind. In addition to
calisthenics, there