In this acknowledgment of the exalted position occupied by the Greek hetairai the author, like most writers upon the subject of the sexual relations, measures virtue not by its antithesis to vice, but by the established masculine standards which have been set up for women to conform to. A Greek wife’s life may have been one continuous scene of subjection to the lowest appetites of a master for whom she may have had not the least degree of respect or affection, and who regarded her only in the light of an instrument for his convenience and pleasure; still such an one would doubtless be accounted as a “virtuous” woman in contradistinction to one of the hetairai whose position enabled her to control her own person and who was able to exercise her own will-power in protecting it against the excesses of Greek men. It is evident that this class of women more than any other in Greece was able to direct its movements and manage its activities, and, therefore, if we bear in mind the characters correlated in the female constitution with the maternal instinct, we may be assured that among the entire population of Athens, the lives of these women were the most pure and the least addicted to excesses. Aspasia, the philosopher and statesman; Hipparchia, practical professor of Cynic philosophy and one of the most voluminous and esteemed writers of her time; Thargelia, the Milesian, whom Xerxes employed at the court of Thessaly, and many others scarcely less renowned, prove that through the exercise of that personal freedom enjoyed by the hetairai, women had at length risen to that position in which they were able to exert a powerful influence, not only on the affairs of state, but upon the intellectual development of the Athenians and the entire world. To say that these women have been written about in an age in which male power and male influence have been in the ascendency, is to say that they have been misunderstood and their movements misinterpreted.