The boyhood of the young Athenian was occupied by school and play; his youth was spent in gymnastic exercises, and sometimes also in scientific studies and military labours. When he attained his majority as a citizen, he acquired the right of exercising his political and civic duties, taking part in popular assemblies and other public gatherings; but apparently the young people did not make much use of these privileges when they first entered on their political majority. Besides these occupations there were many others to draw them away from serious duties: pleasant intercourse with companions, drinking bouts, and also the charms of pretty hetaerae, who were easily won to regard with favour anyone possessing a tolerably well-filled purse. And this was all the compensation they had for exclusion from the society of the daughters of citizens; for, with the exception of the hetaerae, and the flute and cithara players who performed at the banquets, women played no part in social intercourse at Athens. There were but few occasions when the girls left the close confinement of the women’s apartments for any kind of publicity, and this custom, which resembled the Oriental, and was probably introduced by the Ionic Greeks from Asia Minor, while the Doric practice was very different, caused one of the greatest wants of Attic life. This is brought forcibly before us in the comedies of the fourth century, the so-called “New Attic Comedy,” in which the basis was usually a love story, which our modern ideas would regard as purely sensual, or even immoral; while love, in the best sense of the word, is never represented. We must not, on this account, suppose that the Greeks were entirely unacquainted with that kind of affection which is based on real inclination, similarity of mind, and recognition of intellectual virtues; in fact, the contrast often emphasised by poets and artists between _Aphrodite Urania_, as the type of heavenly intellectual love, and _Aphrodite Pandemos_, as that of sensuous love, must convince us of the contrary; while Greek literature also supplies many examples of pure love in the truest sense of the word, though a strong admixture of the sensuous element was natural, even here, to a passionate southern race. It was, however, quite unusual for such attachment to begin before marriage, since opportunities for this were wanting. But often, in spite of the conventional mode by which marriages were arranged, this attachment was developed after marriage, and we must not fall into the mistake of judging married life in Greece, or especially at Athens, only from the greatly exaggerated descriptions of Aristophanes, or the sarcastic tirades of misogynists like Euripides. The great majority of the women were not so superficial or so quarrelsome as these poets have represented them, nor the young men, as a rule, so vicious or hostile to marriage as they are depicted in the majority of the New Attic Comedies.