carefully
attentive to all the little niceties of social intercourse, studying in
every way how to be agreeable to the men, adepts in conversation,
devotees of the Muses and the Graces, they knew how to make their
relations with men answer to all the impulses of a beauty-loving people.
And as the Greeks found aesthetic satisfaction in their masterpieces of
prose and poetry, in their works of architecture and sculpture and
painting, so they found it in their association with the hetaerae.

Owing to such conditions, there arose a most unnatural division of the
admitted functions of woman in the world-order. Says the great orator
Demosthenes: "We take a hetaera for our pleasure, a concubine for daily
attention to our physical wants, a wife to give us legitimate children
and a respected house"--an utterance narrowly defining the status of the
hetaera as contrasted with that of the honorable wife. The latter was the
housewife and mother, nothing more, though surrounded by all the
dignities and privileges of her high station; the former was the
companion, the comrade in whose society were found recreation and
sympathy and intellectual delight, but she was outside the pale of
society, not respected, yet not altogether despised.

It is difficult to ascertain the beginnings of hetairism among the
Greeks. There is a noteworthy absence of it in the Homeric poems, though
the Greek chieftains frequently had concubines, who were slaves captured
in war.

Allusions in the lyric poets show that as early as the sixth century
before our era the hetaera had made her appearance. The earliest
reference to the social evil in the history of Athens is found in the
administration of the lawgiver Solon, who was the first to legalize
prostitution. With the avowed purpose of forestalling the seduction of
virgins and wives, he bought slave girls in the markets of Asia Minor
and placed them in public houses in Athens. This regulation for the
protection of the home was generally regarded as deserving of praise.
Thus speaks the comic poet Philemon:

"But you did well for every man, O Solon:
For they do say you were the first to see
The justice of a public-spirited measure,
The saviour of the State (and it is fit
For me to utter this avowal, Solon);
You, seeing that the State was full of men,
Young, and possessed of all the natural appetites,
And wandering in their lusts where they'd no business.