Vice is generally superstitious; and these ladies accordingly when they lost a lover, instead of attributing it to the superior beauty or accomplishments of their rivals, or the common love of novelty of mankind, always supposed that enchantments had been employed.—Luc. Diall. Hetair. i. t. iv. 124. Footnote 120: Statues, for example, were sometimes erected in their honour—Winkelm. iv. 3. 7. They were generally well educated, and there were none probably who could not read.—Drosè, in Lucian, complaining of the philosopher who kept away her lover, observes that his slave came in the evening bearing a note from his young master.—Diall. Hetair. x. 2. 3. ----- “How do you sell your beef?” said Laïs to a young butcher in the flesh-market. “Three obels the _Hag_,” answered the coxcomb. “And how dare you, said the faded beauty, here in Athens pretend to make use of barbarian weights?” The word in the original signifying an old woman and a Carian weight, it suited her purpose to understand him in the latter sense.[121] ----- Footnote 121: Athen. xiii. 43. where the word is κύβδα.—The Turkish practice of drowning female delinquents in sacks, is merely an imitation of what was performed by a tyrant of old, who disposed of wicked old women in this manner.—Idem. x. 60. In France likewise formerly it was customary to avoid the scandal of a public trial, for noblemen and gentlemen to be examined privately by the king who, when he could satisfy his conscience that they were guilty, ordered them to be “without any fashion of judgment put in a sack and in the night season, by the Marshall’s servants, hurled into a river and so drowned.” Fortescue, Laud, Legg. Angl. chap. 35. p. 82. b. ----- Worshiped and slighted alternately they adopted narrow and interested principles in self-defence. Besides, generally barbarians by birth, they brought along with them from their original homes the creed best suited to their calling—“Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die.” They were often the lumber of Asia and hence known under the appellation of “strange women,” though it is very certain, that many female citizens were from time to time enrolled among their ranks, some through the pressure of adversity, others from a preference for that kind of life. Their education it must be conceded, however, was far more masculine than that of other women. They cultivated all the sciences but that of morals, and concealed their lack of modesty by the dazzling splendour of their wit. Hence among a people with whom intellect was almost everything their company was much sought after and highly valued, not habitually perhaps by statesmen, but by wits, poets, sophists, and young men of fashion. Many of the _bons mots_ uttered by those ladies have been preserved. One day at table Stilpo the philosopher accused Glycera of corrupting the manners of youth.