The problem of the status of the sexes in society was not a new one in fourth-century Greece. As far back, indeed, as we can trace social institutions directly at all, society in Greece had been constituted on patriarchal lines. But patriarchal institutions had far less undisputed acceptance in the Greek world than they had for example in Italy. It was not merely that Attic rules of inheritance gave a definite, though at all times secondary, status to the mother’s kindred; or that in Sparta, Thebes, and some other states, the women enjoyed in many respects a social equality with the men which has been explained in more ways than one. An Ionian Greek had only to travel down his own coast as far as Lycia to find men reckoning descent through the mother, or to travel back in imagination to the legendary origins of his own people, to find that their pedigrees went often up, not to a god, but to a woman. Olympian society was the same. The consort of Zeus held a very different position from that of the wife in a patriarchal household; and on the Asiatic shore, at least, the gods themselves were traced back to a Mother, not to a Father, of them all. Hints, too, were not wanting as to the recent arrival, and un-Aegean origin, of the patriarchal system, which had now prevailed, with its proprietary view of women; and, no less, of the loose hold which this set of customs had upon the popular belief and opinion. In the opening chapters of his history, Herodotus states, and allows his Περσέων λὁγιοι to criticize freely, what might be summarized as a _cherchez-la-femme_ theory of the Eastern Question: and the criticism which he records amounts essentially to the question, ‘Does the position of women in society, as we know it, justify the attempts which have been made to explain the great quarrel by incidents such as those of Io, Medea, and Helen?’ Now this criticism is not merely Persian, nor even Herodotean; the problem whether the Trojan War was really fought about Helen was at least as old as Stesichorus. No sooner did the wakening mind of Hellas cease merely to believe Homer, and begin to think about him, than it struck at once upon this very paradox:--‘Homer says, and insists throughout, that all the war was wrought for Helen’s sake; but do we Greeks ever dream of doing anything of the kind? are our women the least worth fighting about? If they run away with a foreigner, do we not, as a matter of fact, say “good riddance”, and go about our business?’ How this paradox presented itself to Stesichorus and to other literary thinkers of early Greece, and how Herodotus has chosen to handle their solution of it, is a thrice-told tale. All that I am concerned to suggest, at present, is that, at every point where we can test it, opinion in Greece was in flux as to the rightful position of woman in civilized society.