[*] Hypereides, the orator, says, “The woman who goes out of her own home ought to be of such an age that when men meet her, the question is not ‘Who is her husband?’ but ‘Whose mother is she?’” Pericles, in the great funeral oration put in his mouth by Thucydides, says that the best women are those who are talked of for good or ill the very least. Doubtless it is because an Athenian house is a “little oasis of domesticity,” tenderly guarded from all insult,—a miniature world whose joys and sorrows are not to be shared by the outer universe,—that the Athenian treats the private affairs of his family as something seldom to be shared, even with an intimate friend. Of individual women we hear and see little in Athens, but of _noble womanhood_ a great deal. By a hundred tokens, delightful vase paintings, noble monuments, poetic myths, tribute is paid to the self-mastery, the self-forgetfulness, the courage, the gentleness “of the wives and mothers who have made Athens the beacon of Hellas”; and there is one witness better than all the rest. Along the “Street of Tombs,” by the gate of the city, runs the long row of stelæ (funeral monuments), inimitable and chaste memorials to the beloved dead; and here we meet, many times over, the portrayal of a sorrow too deep for common lament, the sorrow for the lovely and gracious figures who have passed into the great Mystery. Along the Street of the Tombs the wives and mothers of Athens are honored not less than the wealthy, the warriors, or the statesmen.