But you did well for every man, O Solon; For they do say you were the first to see The justice of a public-spirited measure, The Saviour of the State.[229] [229] Philemon. Quoted by _Athenæus_, book xiii. By this time, so degraded had womanhood become, that the traffic in female captives for sexual purposes was regarded as a legitimate business, and the revenue accruing from their services was considered a lawful source of gain to the state, its use being devoted to the rearing of temples and to the carrying out of the various projects connected with religious worship. That the Athenians of this period were wholly given over to luxury and licentiousness is shown by the fact that at their bacchanalian feasts, the troops of women who were in attendance and who had been provided for the occasion by the generosity of the state, performed all their duties under direct and explicit instruction of the government “to disobey no order of a guest”; for which wise regulations Solon received the praise and commendation of Athenian men. In a former portion of this work the fact has been noted that until well into the Latter Status of barbarism all women were protected; that among the Kaffirs, the Fiji Islanders, and various other peoples occupying a lower stage in the order of growth, women, although divested of their former influence, are still jealously guarded by the gens to which they belong; and that when maidens are bereft of home and near relatives, they are adopted into some other gens within the tribe where they are invested with the same rights as are its own members. Therefore when contemplating the social condition of the Athenians five or six hundred years B.C., we are naturally led to inquire: What were the causes which during one ethnical period had produced so marked a change in the position of the female sex? For an answer to our question we must recall the facts set forth in this volume relative to the capture of wives, together with the feeling of hatred entertained by early society for alien women. In the time of Pericles, an age when Athens was at the height of its prosperity, the women of the city were divided into five classes as regarded their duties and uses. The first of these consisted of wives, who, for the most part, were kept in seclusion and allowed to exist solely for the purpose of propagating Greek citizens. These women were without influence, possessing no rights or privileges beyond the will of their “lords”; while to such an extent were they considered merely in the light of household furniture that they were not permitted to appear in public, nor to sit at table with their masters.