ost advantageous for
the arts of sculpture and painting. Sensuousness is close akin to
sensuality, and from their passion for these "priestesses of Aphrodite"
the Greek artists, without doubt, derived much of their inspiration,
while the opportunities which hetairism offered for the study of the
female form enabled Praxiteles and his contemporaries and successors to
produce masterpieces which equalled in idealism the works of aesthetic
art produced in the preceding century.

To become the ideal for the painter and the sculptor was the greatest
ambition of the beautiful and cultivated hetaera. In permitting the
artist to portray her charms she not only performed a lasting service
for art, but she also rendered herself celebrated and immortal. The fame
of her beauty was spread throughout all Hellenic lands, and the national
devotion to the goddess Aphrodite was at once extended to her earthly
counterpart. If she united intellectual brilliancy with beauty, fortune
at once cast its most precious gifts at her feet. The most celebrated
men of every city contested for her favors, poets made her the theme of
their verses, artists portrayed her charms with chisel and with brush,
and the wealthy filled her coffers with gold and precious stones.

XI

THE WOMAN QUESTION IN ANCIENT ATHENS

Anyone who makes a careful perusal of the philosophical literature of
Athens in the fourth century before our era will be struck with the
amount of attention that has been paid to the question of the social and
domestic position of woman. If he trace the subject back, he will
observe that in the dramatic literature of the latter part of the
previous century the same problems received the consideration of
Euripides and Aristophanes. And the conviction will be forced upon him
that this agitation was rooted in a sociological movement of great
import, and that the dramatic and philosophical writers merely gave a
literary form to the debates which profoundly stirred Athenian society
in the fifth century.

This discussion of woman's rights is a subject of perennial interest,
and the underlying currents in such movements are usually the same in
every age. They take their rise, too, not in the efforts of
philanthropic men who recognize that the status of woman is not what it
should be, but in the efforts of the members of the sex themselves, who
are sufficiently intelligent to see that they, while having an abundant
share of the burdens, hav