There is one curious and notable series of exceptions to this degradation. The Greeks viewed these outcasts from society with a very friendly eye. They recognized the fact that it was their destiny that had put them into the difficult circumstances with which they had to struggle. And when these women happened to have great powers of mind, or were particularly pleasing, the Greeks chose them as companions for life, and if they could not make them their wives, they treated them as such, and were very kind to them. Thus Pericles lived with Aspasia, and Sophocles with the mother of the father of his favourite grandson. But in Plautus there is not one instance of such a connexion. There are, however, three or four beautiful characters among the slave-girls--Selenium, Planesium, Adelphasium, and Palæstra. They are modest and kindly. They wish to live with one man. Like the Mirah of ‘Daniel Deronda,’ they move about in bad society, and are exposed to every temptation, but by a miraculous providence they remain pure. M. Benoist, probably touched by compassion, thinks that Palæstra is the most lovely of these characters. We are inclined to give the palm to Adelphasium in the ‘Pœnulus,’--though perhaps she is somewhat prim--because we can judge her better, since the play affords more scope for the development of her character. All these girls are found in the end to be freeborn. They have been exposed or stolen in early childhood. Marks of identification go with them in their wanderings. And at last the happy father recognizes his long-lost child, and the lover is delighted with the thought that he can marry. These, then, were the girls with whom the young Greeks and the young Romans had to fall in love, and fall in love they did. But this love was rarely anything else than a mad, headstrong, and even bestial passion. Rarely could the Romans have come in contact with such women that they could realize the fine remark of Steele, “To have loved her was a liberal education.” And indeed the Romans seem to have looked on love as one of those fits which come upon a man once or twice in his life, and which, like too much wine, made him stagger and reel for a time, and then left him in his older years a more sedate and indifferent person. Some such love intrigue occurs in almost every play of Plautus. There are three plays in which no female character appears--the ‘Captivi,’ the ‘Pseudolus,’ and the ‘Trinummus’; but even into two of these love is introduced. In the second the whole play is concerned with the acquisition of a courtezan girl, and in the ‘Trinummus’ Lesbonicus has lost his property through love, and Lysiteles has one or two long speeches on the ruin that attends the lover.