As to the question of whether a young Greek woman would be likely to criticise Aristophanes in this way, opinion certainly differs. History is, for the most part, silent about women. As Mahaffy says, it is only in the dramatists and the philosophers that we can get any glimpses of the woman of the time. Mahaffy's opinions are worth quoting as an example of the pessimism growing out of a bias in favor of a particular type of woman which he idealized in his own mind. He seems utterly incapable of appreciating the humanness of the women in the Greek dramatists, especially those in Euripides. "Sadder than the condition of the aged was that of women," he writes, "at this remarkable period. The days of the noble and high-principled Penelope, of the refined and intellectual Helen, of the innocent and spirited Nausikaa, of the gentle and patient Andromache, had passed away. Men no longer sought and respected the society of the gentler sex. Would that Euripides had even been familiar, as Homer was, with the sound of women brawling in the streets! For in these days they were confined to Asiatic silence and seclusion, while the whole life of the men, both in business and recreation, was essentially public. Just as the feverish excitement of political life nowadays prompts men to spend even their leisure in the clubs, where they meet companions of like passions and interests with themselves, so the Athenian gentleman only came home to eat and sleep. His leisure as well as his business kept him in the market place. His wife and daughters, ignorant of philosophy and politics, were strangers to his real life, and took no interest in his pursuits. "The results were fatal to Athenian society. The women, uninstructed, neglected, and enslaved, soon punished their oppressors with their own keen and bitter weapons, and with none keener than their vices. For, of course, all the grace and delicacy of female character disappeared. Intellectual power in women was distinctly associated with moral depravity, so that excessive ignorance and stupidity was considered the only guarantee of virtue. The qualifications for society became incompatible with the qualifications for home duties, so that the outcasts from society, as we call them, were not the immoral and the profligate but the honorable and the virtuous."