f women. As early as the
seventh century before the Christian era, Cleobulus, one of the seven
sages of Greece, insisted that maidens should have the same intellectual
training as youths, and illustrated his doctrine in the careful
education of his daughter, Cleobuline, who became a poetess of wide
renown.

Pythagoras, who in the sixth century founded his celebrated
philosophical sect in Southern Italy, fully recognized the equality of
the sexes and devised a system of education for women, which made his
feminine followers not only most efficient in all domestic relations,
but also preeminent in philosophical and literary culture. Plato spent
considerable time in Magna Graecia, and became imbued with the spirit of
Pythagorean philosophy. He must have been impressed with its elevating
influence on the status of woman, for in his _Dialogues_ he urged that
women should receive the same education as men, and he himself admitted
members of the gentler sex to the lectures of the Academy.

After Plato's time, accordingly, we find many women engaged in the study
of philosophy, not only among the Academicians, but also in the other
philosophical schools, especially the Cyrenaic, the Megarian, and the
Epicurean. The Peripatetic and the Stoic doctrines seem not to have
appealed to the fair sex.

Alexander's empire, in overthrowing the exclusive State laws of the
various cities, accomplished much for the emancipation of women, and
from that time forward we find women engaged in almost all the branches
of the higher learning. In Alexandria, especially, the daughters of
scholars pursued studies in philosophy, in philology, and in
archaeology, and some of them became celebrated. In the Graeco-Roman
period, Plutarch was a constant advocate of female education, and the
circle of learned women that he has made known to us indicates how
general was the spread of education among the women of his day.

Aspasia had set the fashion for hetaarae in Athens to devote attention to
rhetoric and philosophy; consequently, many of the blue-stockings of
Greece belonged to the hetaera class. Some acquaintance with the higher
learning, however, became fashionable also in the retirement of the
gynaeceum, and many maidens and matrons of honorable station employed
their leisure moments in reading the works of philosophers and poets,
and received, if not public, at least private instruction from
professional lecturers.

The variety of intellectual pur