The laws and the public institutions, indeed, by authorizing the privacy of women, set a high value on the sanctity of the marriage vow. But in Athens, imagination, sentiment, luxury, the taste in arts and pleasures, was opposite to the laws. The courtezans, therefore may be said to have come in support of the manners. There was no check upon public licentiousness; but private infidelity, which concerned the peace of families, was punished as a crime. By a strange and perhaps unequalled singularity the men were corrupted, yet the domestic manners were pure. It seems as if the courtezans had not been considered to belong to their sex; and, by a convention to which the laws and the manners bended, while other women were estimated merely by their virtues, they were estimated only by their accomplishments. These reasons will in some measure, account for the honors, which the votaries of Venus so often received in Greece. Otherwise we should have been at a loss to conceive, why six or seven writers had exerted their talents to celebrate the courtezans of Athens--why three great painters had uniformly devoted their pencils to represent them on canvass--and why so many poets had strove to immortalize them in verses. We should hardly have believed that so many illustrious men had courted their society--that Aspasia had been consulted in deliberations of peace and war--that Phryne had a statue of gold placed between the statues of two kings at Delphos--that, after death, magnificent tombs had been erected to their memory. "The traveller," says a Greek writer, "who, approaching to Athens, sees on the side of the way a monument which attracts his notice at a distance, will imagine that it is the tomb of Miltiades or Pericles, or of some other great man, who has done honor to his country by his services. He advances, he reads, and he learns that it is a courtezan of Athens who is interred with so much pomp." Theopompus, in a letter to Alexander the Great, speaks also of the same monument in words to the following effect--"Thus, after her death, is a prostitute honored; while not one of those brave warriors who fell in Asia, fighting for you, and for the safety of Greece, has so much as a stone erected to his memory, or an inscription to preserve his ashes from insult." Such was the homage which that enthusiastic people, voluptuous and passionate, paid to beauty. More guided by sentiment than reason, and having laws rather than principles, they banished their great men, honored their courtezans, murdered Socrates, permitted themselves to be governed by Aspasia, preserved inviolate the marriage bed, and placed Phryne in the temple of Apollo! ROMAN WOMEN.