Yet the poet was also appreciative of the good qualities in woman, as is seen in the sentiment: "A good woman is the rudder of her household;" with which we may compare the words of another poet: "A sympathetic wife is man's chiefest treasure;" and at times Menander notes how even a woman of serious faults may prove to be the greatest blessing: "How burdensome a wife extravagant; Not as he would may he who's ta'en her live. Yet this of good she has: she bears him children; She watches o'er his couch, if he be sick, With tender care; she's ever by his side When fortune frowns; and should he chance to die, The last sad rites with honor due she pays." Surely a touching portraiture of woman's gentle ministry, and worthy to be compared with Scott's famous lines! In spite of the numerous complaints against woman, the plays of the New Comedy usually ended in a happy marriage--the wild youth falls in love with the penniless maiden, reforms, discovers her to be wellborn, and wins over the angry parent; then follow joyous wedding festivities, and happiness ever afterward. Such is the usual course of the plot. Satirical reflections on woman, especially when made in poetry, must not be taken too seriously; and where romantic love is also the theme for song, we may be sure that woman, though much abused, is yet tenderly regarded and highly esteemed among men. A social movement for the emancipation of woman, which had occupied the attention of thinking men and women of Athens in the latter half of the fifth century before Christ, which had been started by Aspasia in her salon, which had been discussed by Socrates and the Socratics, especially AEschines, and which had brought about a battle royal between the dramatists Euripides and Aristophanes, naturally called for scientific treatment at the hands of the philosophers. The works of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon accordingly devote much space to the consideration of the Woman Question. The female sex, hitherto "accustomed to live cowed and in obscurity,"--as Plato puts it,--justly claimed more favorable conditions; and the philosophers who endeavored to bring about a better social status asserted that woman deserved proper recognition at the hands of men. Plato had taken seriously to heart the lessons of the Peloponnesian War. He was keenly sensitive to the evils of democracy as then existent, and recognized the need of governmental and social reform. He felt that in the disregard of women at least half the citizen population had been neglected, and we have in his works the strongest assertion of the equality of the sexes.