were courses in music, poetry, diction, philosophy,
politics, and art. The graduates were admirable. Their beauty was
admirable also. But they were admired less for that than because the study
of every grace had contributed to their understanding of the unique art,
which is that of charming. Charm they exhaled. Gifted and accomplished,
they were the only women with whom an enlightened Greek could converse.
Their attitude was irreproachable, their distinction extreme, and they
differed from other women only in that their manners were more correct.
Plato had one of them for muse. Sophocles another. To Glycera, of whom
Menander wrote, poetry was an insufficient homage, a statue was erected to
her.[12]

These instances, anomalous now, were logical then. To the Greek the gifts
of the gods were more beneficent here than hereafter. Of divine gifts none
was more appreciated and none more allied to the givers than beauty. The
value attached to it, prodigious in peace, was potent in war, potent in
law. At Plataea, Callicrates was numbered among the heroes because of his
looks. For the same reason Philippus, killed in battle, was nobly buried
and worshipped by those who had been his foes. For the same reason Phryne,
charged with high crimes, was acquitted.

At the Eleusinian mysteries, beneath the portico of the temple, before
assembled Athens, Phryne appeared in the guise of Aphrodite rising from
the sea. Charged with parodying the rites, she was summoned before the
Areiopagus. Conviction meant death. But her beauty, which her advocate
suddenly and cleverly disclosed, was her sole defence. It sufficed for
the acquittal of this woman whose statue, the work of Praxiteles, was
placed in the temple at Delphi.

The tomb of a sister had for epitaph: "Greece, formerly invincible, was
conquered and enslaved by the beauty of Lais, daughter of Love, graduate
of Corinth, who here rests in the noble fields of Thessaly." For Thais a
monument was erected. At Tarsus Glycera had honors semi-divine. In Greece,
let a woman be what she might, if beautiful she was deified, if charming
she was adored. In either case she represented vivified aestheticism to a
people at once intellectual and athletic, temperate and rich, a people
who, contemptous of any time-consuming business, supported by a nation of
slaves, possessing in consequence that wide leisure without which the
richest are poor, attained in their brilliant city almost the ideal. They
knew