ife, but he committed her
and her children tenderly to their care. Thus parted the ill-assorted
pair, each of whom has attained world-wide celebrity--the one as the
world's philosopher, the other as the proverbial shrew.

In the early days of the Athenian democracy, women were powerful
influences in civic matters, as is instanced in the case of Cylon and
his conspirators, all of whom were ruthlessly slain except those who
fell at the feet of the archons' wives, who in pity saved them.
Herodotus tells a story which shows the intense interest of the
Athenian women in public affairs in early times. There was always great
rivalry between Athens and the neighboring island of AEgina. At one time,
the Athenians demanded of the AEginetans the fulfilment of certain
conditions regarding the statues of Attic olive wood which the latter
had stolen from the Epidaurians. "The people of AEgina refused; and the
members of an expedition sent against them, attempting to drag away the
sacred statues with ropes, were seized with madness and destroyed, one
after another, so that only one man returned alive to Athens. This man,
recounting the disasters, was surrounded by the women whose husbands had
been killed, and each one pierced him with the bodkin that fastened her
garment; so that he died under their hands. The conduct of these women
filled the Athenians with horror, and, as a punishment, they obliged all
the women of Athens to give up the Dorian dress which they wore, and
instead to clothe themselves with the Ionian tunic, which had no need of
any pin to fasten it."

Under the tyrants, the women of aristocratic families throughout Hellas
possessed an influence which was lost under the levelling process of
democracy. Pisistratus, after his first banishment, furthered the
reestablishment of his tyranny by wedding the daughter of Megacles, and
thus winning for himself the influence of the powerful Alcmaeonidae. He
worshipped Athena as his patron goddess, and, to give proper religious
sanction to his return, arranged a singular ceremony, which Herodotus
regards as "the most ridiculous that was ever imagined," but which
introduces to us the most beautiful Athenian maiden of the times:

"In the Paeanian tribe, there was a woman named Phya, four cubits tall,
and in other respects handsome. Having dressed this woman in a complete
suit of armor, and placed her in a chariot, and instructed her how to
assume a becoming demeanor, the followers