It is not always realized how almost oriental was the seclusion in which respectable women were kept at Athens during the period of its greatness in drama. Respectable women of good family were not permitted to leave their homes except for special reasons, nor to converse with men other than near relatives or slaves. When it is remembered that the physical arrangements of the Greek theaters did not readily admit of interior scenes (see pp. 237 ff., above) it will be understood how difficult it was for an ancient playwright to bring women of the better class upon his stage. This applies particularly to comedy as being a more accurate mirror of contemporaneous manners; in tragedy, as will presently appear, it was counteracted by another factor. At weddings, funerals, and religious festivals women, especially married women, were allowed greater liberty than at other times. Thus, in Aristophanes’ _Women at the Thesmophoria_ the coming of the _festa_ affords them an opportunity of carrying on the business of the play. In the same writer’s _Women in Council_ they act in secret and disguised as men until their coup d’état has succeeded and the government has been voted into their hands. The situation in Aristophanes’ _Lysistrata_ is quite as abnormal, being nothing more or less than a “sex strike!” In more conventional plays the speaking characters, apart from divinities, are practically restricted to women of the demimonde, foreign residents (_metics_), female slaves, those other virtuous but vulgar creatures whom poverty has compelled to seek a livelihood in various business pursuits of the humbler sort, and finally women advanced in years, shrewish in disposition, and unattractive in person. The first and last types are especially common in New Comedy, while Plautus’ _Persian_ is said to be unique in its presentation of a chaste and free-born maiden in an active rôle.[351] Even the girl who has excited the young man’s affections and whose counterpart in modern drama would be a conspicuous figure is seldom seen and is not always heard. The most that she seems normally capable of doing is to ejaculate a cry of agony from behind the scenes at the moment of childbirth. This is the more surprising since the fact of her Attic citizenship is rarely established and sometimes is not even suspected until the very close of the play. The poet’s consciousness of what he intends to make of her—a free-born citizen and a legal wife—apparently constrains him to protect her from an unconventionality of conduct which, though suitable to her present condition, would afterward be looked back upon with regret by herself, her husband and newly recovered relatives, and even by the spectators themselves. Truth to tell the girls from whom an Athenian was required to take his bride were scarcely fitted to be his intellectual companions or to grace a dialogue in drama, while the best of the courtesans could qualify in either capacity. According to