Hardly had she come, before Socrates and Plato, and Anaxagoras the pure old man, became her frequent guests, and honored her with the name of friend. In such a society, Pericles saw that his own soul would grow; so sustained, he should be more for Athens and himself. He was no Christian to deny himself for the sake of that unhappy wife and children,--a wife whose discontent had already infected the state. The gods he knew--Zeus and Eros--smiled on the step he took. What if the laws of Athens forbade a legal marriage with a foreigner? Pericles was Athens; and what he respected, all men must honor. Aspasia had, so far as we know, a free maiden heart; and Pericles shows us in what light he regarded her, by divorcing his wife to consolidate their union, and subsequently forcing the courts to legitimate her child. Had he omitted these proofs of his own sincerity and her honor, not a voice would have been raised against either. What need to take these steps, if she were the woman Aristophanes would have us see? This divorce created or strengthened the political opposition to Pericles. This opposition was headed by his two sons and their forsaken mother, joined by the pure Athenian blood to which theirs was akin, and gained all its strength and popularity from the wit and falsehood of Aristophanes and the players. Follow the story as it goes, and see Aspasia, at last, summoned before the Areopagus. What are the charges against her? The very same that were preferred against her friends, Socrates and Anaxagoras. "She walks the streets unveiled, she sits at the table with men, she does not believe in the Greek gods, she talks about one sole Creator, she has original ideas about the motions of the sun and moon; _therefore_ her society corrupts youth." Not a word about vice of any sort. Is it for abandoned women that the best men of any age are willing to entreat before a senate? The tears which Pericles shed then for Aspasia glitter like gems on the historic page. When the plague came, his first thought was for her safety; and, after his death, her name shares the retirement of her widowed life. There was a rumor that she afterward married a rich grazier, whom she raised to eminence in the state. Not unlikely that such a rumor might grow in the minds of those who had not forgotten the great men _she_ made, when they saw the success of Lysicles; but other authors assert that his wife was the Aspasia who was also known as a midwife in Athens. It is a noble picture, it seems to me; and when we consider the prejudice of a Christian age and country, the mob that a Bloomer skirt will attract in our own cities, we need not wonder that slander followed an unveiled face in Athens. What do we know of the women of the age of Augustus?--of the galaxy that spanned the sky of Louis XIV.?