ldom in
which she was held, we find that it was the wise and far-seeing Aspasia.

Owing to the intellectual awakening at Athens during the Periclean Age
and the influx of new ideas from the various Hellenic countries, a
liberal party had arisen in the city, chiefly under the leadership of
Pericles and Anaxagoras--a radical party, headed by men of culture and
science, who taught that knowledge was power, who despised the
established religion, and who set at naught the domestic manners of the
day by seeking to elevate woman. Socrates, also, was heartily in
sympathy with the objects of this party, as was the dramatist Euripides.
On the other side were the ultra-conservatives, of whom Cimon and
Aristophanes were representatives. The latter frequently made Pericles,
Aspasia, Socrates, and Euripides the subjects of his satire. These
Tories of the day saw in the tenets of the new party the subversion of
all the principles of the old democracy, and they fought most bitterly
to preserve established institutions. Toward the close of Xenophon's
treatise on _Domestic Economy_, Critobulus, who has been impressed by
the story of Ischomachus, wishes to learn how he too, may educate his
young wife, and Socrates advises him to consult with Aspasia. The
profound deference in which she was held by all the philosophers is a
further indication that from her they had derived many of their advanced
ideas regarding the relations of the sexes. Hence while positive
evidence is lacking, incidental touches and sidelights on the Woman
Question point unerringly to the one great woman of ancient Athens as
the originator of the first movement for the emancipation of woman
recorded in history.

As Aspasia, through her intercourse with the great, had attained
unbounded influence in the State, and as her circle was the exponent of
the ideas which offended the conventional spirit, it was natural that
she should be involved in the storm of criticism that befell the leaders
of thought. As a woman who had stepped out of the beaten track of
womanhood, she was made the subject of the coarsest slanders. She was
called the Hera to this Zeus, Pericles, the Omphale, the Deianira of the
Heracles of the day; her girl friends and pupils, who enjoyed the same
liberty she claimed for herself, were most violently defamed; she was
said to have induced, for the basest of reasons, Pericles to bring on
the Peloponnesian and Samian wars. The comic poets, as the chief organs