Because of the efforts put forth by scholastics for two thousand years to belittle or annul the importance of the services rendered by the hetairai, they will doubtless for some time continue to be judged not by their intellectual vigour nor by what they accomplished, but by the social position into which, through the exigencies of masculine domination, they had been jostled. The fact has been observed that less than two centuries prior to the age of Aspasia and Socrates, Solon had given to the calling of prostitution the sanction of religion and law; that he had purchased a sufficient number of young slaves from surrounding countries to satisfy the demands of the men of Greece; and that he had made the calling of these girls a source of public revenue for which services he had received the title of “Saviour of the State.” We would scarcely expect, therefore, to find chastity among the prominent virtues of the Periclean age. I wish to emphasize the fact that by the conditions of society at that time, the class designated as hetairai, although they were in a certain sense free, were practically prevented, no matter what may have been their natural inclinations or aspirations, from rising to a higher plane of moral action, and furthermore that the existing conditions were wholly the result of the supremacy gained by the lower propensities over the higher forces developed in human nature. Had these gifted women accepted the position of wife, ignorance and seclusion would have been their portion, while their sexual degradation would have been none the less complete or perfect; indeed it would have been all the more intolerable, for the reason that the degradation of their persons, which in the position of hetairai was sued for as a privilege, in the position of wife would have been claimed as a right. By most writers upon this subject the fact seems to have been overlooked, or, if observed, has not been acknowledged, that licentiousness among women during a certain period of Greek life, about which so much has been written, was governed wholly by the demands of their masters; in fact, throughout the history of mankind since the ascendency of the male over the female has been gained, the class which has controlled the means of support, and within which has resided all the power to direct the activities of women, has ever regulated the supply of victims to be offered upon the altar of lust; and in all these regulations may be observed such an adjustment of women’s “duties” to the “necessities” of the male nature, that no alternative has been left them but submission. CHAPTER V ROMAN LAW, ROMAN WOMEN, AND CHRISTIANITY