The influence that these confraternities exercised in familiarizing the minds of the Greek citizens with the religious practices and tenets of foreign countries must have been very great. Every such association had a temple of its own, in which it offered sacrifices to its own particular god. But, after providing for this, the greater part of the subscriptions went in providing a periodical banquet at which its members could meet for social intercourse, and to which they were no doubt sometimes allowed to bring guests. But at these gatherings, as apparently at all others of the confraternity, all were equal, and there were no distinctions of rank. Moreover, in addition to the foreign members for whom the institution was originally designed, they must early have begun to admit Greeks; and these were generally, though not always, persons who were in the first instance led to them by a leaning to foreign superstitions, and particularly to that orgiastic ritual with which the worship of the Asiatic gods was generally associated in Greek minds. It is noteworthy that among the Greek names inscribed upon the stelae containing the lists of members that have come down to us, those of women are far more numerous than those of men. Yet they seldom seem to have been of the highest class in their own community, and it is difficult to conceive of a Greek matron leaving her gynaeceum to take part with slaves and freedmen in nocturnal feasts or orgies. Among those whom we know otherwise as belonging to these confraternities are Phryne the celebrated courtezan, Tryphera and Aristion, who followed the same manner of life[92], and Glaucothea the mother of Æschines and a perfume-seller, a trade then considered as disreputable as in the reign of Louis XIV[93]. On the other hand, it seems to follow from what Plutarch says, that King Philip of Macedon first saw and loved Olympias, mother of Alexander, at a meeting of one of these confraternities[94], and it is possible that outside Greece proper they lost something of their disreputable associations.