ambitions,
and praising his warlike ardor against peoples who had never furnished
room for complaint to Rome? The source of these errors was the theory of
emanations. The first dreamers, who were called philosophers imagined
that matter and light were co-eternal; they supposed that was all one
unformed and tenebrous mass; and from the former they established the
principle of evil and of all imperfection, while they regarded the latter
as sovereign perfection. Creation, or, one might better say
co-ordination, was only the emanation of light which penetrated chaos,
but the mixture of light and matter was the cause of all the inevitable
imperfections of the universe. The soul of man was part and parcel of
divinity or of increased light; it would never attain happiness until it
was re-united to the source of all light; but for it, we would be free
from all things we call gross and material, and we would be taken into
the ethereal regions by contemplation and by abstinence from the
pleasures of the flesh. When these absurdities were adopted for the
regulation of conduct, they necessarily resulted in a fierce morality,
inimical to all the pleasures of life, such, in a word, as that of the
Gymnosophists or, in a lesser measure, of the Trappists.

But despite the gloomy nonsense of certain atrabilious dreamers, the
wonderful era of the Greeks was that of the reign of the courtesans.
It was about the houses of these that revolved the sands of Pactolus,
their fame exceeded that of the first men of Greece. The rich offerings
that decorated the temples of the Gods were the gifts of these women,
and it must be remembered that most of them were foreigners, originating,
for the most part, in Asia Minor. It happened that an Athenian
financier, who resembled the rest of his tribe as much as two drops of
water, proposed once to levy an impost upon the courtesans. As he spoke
eloquently of the incalculable advantages which would accrue to the
Government by this tax, a certain person asked him by whom the courtesans
were paid. "By the Athenians," replied our orator, after deliberation.
"Then it would be the Athenians who would pay the impost," replied the
questioner, and the people of Athens, who had a little more sense than
certain legislative assemblies, hooted the orator down, and there was
never any more question about a tax upon courtesans.

Corinth was famous for the number and beauty of its courtesans, from
which comes the