Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/126

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
90
ESSAYS OF WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

with these women and formed attachments, which it was impossible to do with Athenian women. By the side of the legitimate order there came into existence a class of courtesans, who exercised, by education, beauty, wit, grace, and coquetry, the influence over man which belonged to woman, and to which Greeks were especially susceptible. If Athenæus may be believed, this class was very numerous. He gives a collection of the bons mots attributed to them and specifies the ones who were in more or less enduring relations with all the well-known men of Athens. While the status-wives were shut up at home, keeping house and nursing children, these love-wives enjoyed the society of the men and influenced the state; and some of them became famous in more ways than one. Aspasia made a trade of educating courtesans; Socrates refers to her a man whom he sought to indoctrinate with higher doctrines of conjugal duty.[1] Cicero[2] tells a story in which she appears as the instructress of Xenophon and his wife, showing them by the Socratic method that every man wants the best wife and every woman the best husband possibly to be had; therefore, to satisfy each other, each should strive to be as good as possible. She was, it appears, the competent teacher of the art of matrimony, and is credited with a share in the great movement to emancipate women. Aristophanes[3] attributes the Peloponnesian war to the anger of Pericles, on her account, against Megareans who had stolen two of her courtesans. Socrates[4] says that she was skilled in rhetoric and had taught many orators, including Pericles. Such were the mores by the end of the fifth century; wives at home like servants, intellectual recrea-

  1. Xenophon: Economicus, 3, 14.
  2. De Inventione Rhetorica, I, 31 (51).
  3. Acharnians, 524.
  4. Menexenos, 235.