Women of the better classes only went out attended by a servant or slave, and then but seldom. A respectable woman stayed at home as much as possible; in fact, the symbol of domestic life was a tortoise, a creature which never leaves its house, and was regarded as an attribute of Aphrodite Urania. In consequence, the women liked to linger by the windows of the upper storey, the one generally used for their apartments, in order to look down on the street, which afforded many women the only entertainment and change they had in the day’s occupations. There were no common meetings for them as there were for men. They visited one another occasionally, and there were a few festivals in the year to which they went without the men, and then the proceedings seem to have been very lively, as for instance, at the Thesmophoria. The women drove in their finest clothes to the Eleusinian celebrations, and they also took part in the Panathenaea, on which occasion the daughters of the resident foreigners (μέτοικοι) carried their chairs and sunshades behind them. In general, it appears as though more liberty had been gradually granted women in the matter of appearance in public, though this liberty did not extend in Greece as far as at Alexandria in the time of the Ptolemies, when Theocritus, in one of his idylls, represents two citizens’ wives, attended by their servants, penetrating into the densest crowd on the occasion of the Festival of Adonis. The manifold contradictions which we find in the ancient writers regarding the public appearance of women which have called forth so many various opinions among the learned of the present day, must be attributed in part to differences of period and, in part, to differences of locality. Notwithstanding this, everywhere and always in antiquity a woman’s sphere was supposed to be the household, and when the family and the number of slaves was large, this charge required a good deal of strength and attention. Not only had all the food to be prepared for the household, but also the clothing had to be provided for all its members; for it was very unusual for any woman, who had numerous slaves at her disposal, to purchase stuffs or clothes ready-made. They therefore spent a great part of the day with their daughters and maids in a specially appointed part of the house, where the looms were set up. Here, in the first place, the wool, which was bought in a rough condition, was prepared for working, by washing and beating, then fulled and carded, disagreeable occupations which, on account of the exertion required, were usually left to the maids. The wool thus prepared for working was then put in large work-or spinning-baskets (κáλαθοι or τáλαροι), [Illustration: FIG. 80.]