We know that where the minds of married dames are fixed chiefly upon dress and show their anxiety has often very little reference to their husbands. And if it be their object to excite admiration out of doors, it is simply as a means to an end, which end, in too many cases, is intrigue. Proofs exist that among the Athenian ladies there were numbers whose idle lives and luxurious habits produced their natural results—loose principles and dissolute manners. The beauty of Alcibiades drew them after him in crowds,[106] though we do not read that, like another very handsome personage in a modern republic, the son of Cleinias found it necessary to carry about a club to defend himself from their importunities. They went abroad elaborately habited and adorned merely to attract the gaze of men,[107] and having thus sown the first seeds of intrigue, they took care to cultivate and bring them to maturity. The felicitous invention of Falstaff’s friends, which got him safe out of Ford’s house in a buck-basket, was not so new as Shakspeare, perhaps, imagined. His predecessors on the Athenian stage had already discovered stratagems equally happy among their countrywomen, whose lovers we find made their way into the harem wrapped up in straw, like carp—or crept through holes made purposely by fair hands in the eaves—or scaled the envious walls by the help of those vulgar contrivances called ladders.[108] ----- Footnote 106: Xenoph. Memor. i. 2. 24. Ἀλκιβιάδης δ᾽ αὖ διὰ μὲν κάλλος ὑπὸ πολλῶν καὶ σεμνῶν γυναικῶν θηρώμενος. κ. τ. λ. Footnote 107: Aristoph. Nub. 60. Married ladies occasionally rode out in carriages with their husbands. Demosth. cont. Mid. § 44. Even at Sparta we find young ladies possessed of their carriages called Canathra, resembling in form griffins, or goat-stags, in which they rode abroad during religious processions. Plut. Ages. § 19. Cf. Xenoph. Ages. p. 73. Hutchin. cum not. et add. p. 89. Athen. iv. 16, cum annot. p. 449. Scheffer, de Re Vehic. i. 7. p. 68. The same custom prevailed in Thessaly and elsewhere. Athen. xii. 37. Luxurious ladies at Athens used to perfume even the soles of their feet. Their lapdogs lived in great state, and slept on carpets of Miletos. Athen. xii. 78. Footnote 108: Xenarch. ap. Athen. xiii. 24. -----