of the people; but in the best days
of Athens her citizenship was regarded as so high a privilege that the
franchise was most jealously guarded. Consequently, in the fifth century
we see in Athens and Attica a population of about four hundred thousand,
of which not more than fifty thousand were citizens; the rest consisted
of minors, of resident aliens numbering some fifteen thousand, and of
slaves, of whom there were about two hundred thousand in the Periclean
Age.

To preserve the purity of the citizenship in so large a population of
residents, increased by thousands of visitors and strangers who
frequented the metropolis, every precaution was taken that the daughters
of Athens should not be wedded to foreigners, and that no spurious
offspring should be palmed off on the State. Hence marriage by a citizen
was restricted to a union with a legitimate Athenian maiden with full
birthright. The marriage of an Athenian maiden with a stranger, or of a
citizen with a foreigner, was strictly forbidden, and the offspring of
such a union was illegitimate.

Under such a conception of polity, marriage lay at the very basis of the
State; and respect for the local deities, obligations of citizenship,
and regard for one's race and lineage, demanded that every safeguard
should be thrown about it, and that the women of Athens should conform
to those enactments and customs which would fit them to be the mothers
of citizens and would keep from them every entangling intrigue with
strangers.

The result of this polity was a singular phenomenon: there were in
Athens two classes of women--one carefully secluded and restricted,
under the rigid surveillance of law and custom; the other, free to do
whatever it pleased, except to marry citizens. Yet the latter class
would gladly have exchanged places with the former; while the former, no
doubt, envied the freedom and social accomplishments of the latter. The
one class consisted of the highborn matrons of Athens, glorying in their
birthright, and rulers of the home; the other, of the resident aliens of
the female sex, unmarried, emancipated intellectually as untrammelled
morally, who could become the "companions" of the great men of the city.
Thus, owing to the Athenian conception of the city-state, the natural
functions of woman--domesticity and companionship, which should be
united in one person, were divided, the Athenian man looking to his wife
merely for the care of the home and the beari