The truth almost certainly is, that the love between man and woman in ancient Greece differed very little from the love between man and woman as it exists now. Marriage was, it is true, purely a matter of business; most wives aspired to nothing more than the management of the nursery and the household, and most women being without education, and living in seclusion, could scarcely associate, intellectually at least, on equal terms with their husbands or lovers. But this proves nothing more than _mariages de convenance_, and love based on the fascination exercised by sensuous attraction prove now. Then, as in our own time, there were marriages and marriages, liaisons and liaisons. The story which Plutarch tells of Callias (_Cimon._ iv.) shows that marriage was often based on love. The pictures given of Hector and Andromache in the _Iliad_, of Alcinous and Arete, of Ulysses and Penelope, of Menelaus and Helen in the _Odyssey_, the charming account of Ischomachus and his young wife in the _Œconomics_ of Xenophon, the noble and pathetic story of Pantheia and Abradatas in the _Cyropædeia_, the story which, in his life of Agis,[40] Plutarch tells of Chilonis, and, in the _Morals_, of Camma,[41] and innumerable other legends, traditions, and anecdotes, prove that women could inspire and return as pure and as chivalrous a love as any of the heroines of chivalry. The poet who could write about marriage as Homer does in the Sixth Odyssey would have had little to learn from modern refinement.[42] The love which Critobulus describes himself as having for Amandra, in the _Symposium_ of Xenophon, and the remarks made by Socrates in that dialogue embody the most exalted conceptions of the passion of love between the sexes. The sentiments of Plutarch on this subject are indistinguishable from the most refined notions of the modern world, as is abundantly illustrated in the _Amatorius_, the _Conjugalia Præcepta_, and in the remarks on marriage in the eighth chapter of the Essay on Moral Virtue. If Ajax and Hercules became brutes, Tecmessa and Deianeira were not the only women who have discovered that men are, too often, May when they woo, and December when they wed. It is ridiculous to suppose that a people whose popular poetry could present such types of womanhood as Arete, Antigone, Alcestis, Deianeira, Electra, Macaria, Iphigenia, Evadne, and Polyxena, who could boast such poetesses as Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Myrtis, and Damophila, and whose society was graced by such women as Aspasia, Diotima, Gnathæna, Herpyllis, Metaneira, and Leontium, should have given expression to passion, sentiment, and romance only in παιδικοι ὑμνοι.