Pericles, in his famous funeral oration over those who fell in the Peloponnesian war, thus addresses the Athenian women: "To the wives who will henceforth live in widowhood, I will speak, in one short sentence only, of womanly virtue. She is the best woman who is most truly a woman, and her reputation is the highest whose name is never in the mouths of men for good or for evil." Seclusion was the best thing that the most intellectual pre-Christian republic could give to its honorable women. The freedom with which the hetairse, who were foreigners or daughters of slaves, mingled with statesmen and philosophers, brought them open political influence, but not a hint of voting power or of office-holding. For the sake of brevity, I will confine my reference to Roman custom to a single pregnant sentence from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Empire." He says: "In every age and country the wiser, or at least the stronger of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life. In hereditary monarchies, however, and especially in those of modern Europe, the gallant spirit of chivalry, and the law of succession, have accustomed us to allow a singular exception, and a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment, civil or military. But, as the Roman Emperors were still considered as the generals and magistrates of the Republic, their wives and mothers, although dignified by the name of Augusta, were never associated to their personal honors; and a female reign would have appeared an inexplicable prodigy in the eyes of those primitive Romans, who married without love, or loved without delicacy or respect." The warlike states named republics in the Middle Ages had no woman Doge, or Duke, although women rose to the semblance of political power with empires and kingdoms, in Italy and Spain as well as in Germany and France, Austria and Russia.