mere prostitute. Athenaeus (Bk. xiii, Chs.
XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the _hetaira_
could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and
virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of
prostitutes, though these might ape her name. The _hetairae_ "were
almost the only Greek women," says Donaldson (_Woman_, p. 59),
"who exhibited what was best and noblest in women's nature." This
fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such
intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a _hetaira_.
There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction.
"AEschines, in his dialogue entitled 'Aspasia,'" writes Gomperz,
the historian of Greek philosophy (_Greek Thinkers_, vol. iii,
pp. 124 and 343), "puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman
an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her
sex. It would be exceedingly strange," Gomperz adds, in arguing
that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical
Aspasia, "if three authors--Plato, Xenophon and AEschines--had
agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with
what we might very reasonably have expected her to possess--a
highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence." It is even
possible that the movement for woman's right which, as we dimly
divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in
the fourth century B.C., was led by _hetairae_. According to Ivo
Bruns (_Frauenemancipation in Athen_, 1900, p. 19) "the most
certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a
strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and
Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement."
It was the existence of this movement which made Plato's ideas on
the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us.
It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented
on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should
better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel
finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who
are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy. Ninon
de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but
she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn
who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious
s