Our review of female society at Athens would be incomplete were we to overlook the Hetairæ who exerted so powerful an influence over the morals and destinies of the state. They occupied much the same position which the same class of females still do in modern communities, cultivated in mind, polished and elegant in manners, but scarcely deserving as a body to be viewed in the light in which a very distinguished historian has placed them.[116] Their position, however, was anomalous, resembling rather that of kings’ mistresses in modern times, whose vices are tolerated on account of their rank, than that of plebeian sinners whose deficiencies in birth and fortune exclude them from good society. There is much difficulty in rightly apprehending the notions of the ancients on the subject of these women. At first sight we are shocked to find that, during one festival, they were permitted to enter the temples in company with modest ladies. But in what Christian country are they excluded from church?[117] Again, behold in our theatres the matron and the courtezan in the same box, while at Athens even foreign women were not suffered to approach the space set apart for the female citizens. Nevertheless, though on this point so rigid, they were in their own houses permitted occasionally to visit them[118] and receive instructions from their lips, as in Turkish harems ladies do from the Almè. ----- Footnote 116: Mitford, Hist, of Greece, iii. 4. sqq. It appears not to have been common for these women to rear the children they bore, more particularly when they were girls. They flew to the practice of infanticide that they might remain at liberty. Lucian, Hetair. Diall. ii. 5. iv. 124. Footnote 117: Besides, from a passage in Lucian it appears that the ladies and the hetairæ frequented together the public baths.—Diall. Hetair. xii. 4. Footnote 118: Cf. Antiphon. Nec. Venef. § 5. -----