After the Spartan women, we should naturally discuss the position and influence of women among the Athenians. But a singular phenomenon chronologically anterior arrests our attention. The Spartan Constitution remained nearly in the same condition from the ninth century to the fourth. Our knowledge of the life of the Athenian women relates mainly to the fifth and later centuries. In the seventh and sixth occurred the movement among women to which I allude. Unfortunately many features of it are obscure. The ancients did not feel much interest in it, and the records in which its history was contained have nearly all perished. The centre of the movement was the poetess Sappho. She of herself would deserve a passing notice in any account of ancient women, for she attained a position altogether unique. She was the only woman in all antiquity whose productions by universal consent placed her on the same level with the greatest poets of the other sex. Solon, on hearing one of her songs sung at a banquet, got the singer to teach it to him immediately, saying that he wished to learn it and die.[33] Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, refer to her in terms of profound respect. Plato called her the tenth Muse. And Strabo seems to express the opinion of antiquity when he says that she was something quite wonderful; “for we do not know,” he says,[34] “in the whole period of time of which there is any record, the appearance of a single woman that could rival her, even in a slight degree, in respect of poetry.” This woman determined to do her utmost to elevate her sex. The one method of culture open to women at that time was poetry. There was no other form of literature, and accordingly she systematically trained her pupils to be poets, and to weave into verse the noblest maxims of the intellect and the deepest emotions of the heart. Young people with richly endowed minds flocked to her from all quarters, and formed a kind of woman’s college. There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and monotonous routine to which women’s lives were sacrificed, and they were anxious to rise to something nobler and better. We learn this from Sappho herself. It is thus that she addresses an uneducated woman:-- “Dying thou shalt lie in the tomb, and there shall be no remembrance of thee afterwards, for thou partakest not of the roses of Pieria: yea, undistinguished shalt thou walk in the halls of Hades, fluttering about with the pithless dead.” And one of her most distinguished pupils, Erinna, who died at the early age of nineteen, sang in her poem ‘The Distaff’ the sorrows of a girl whom her mother compelled to work at the loom and the distaff while she herself longed to cultivate the worship of the Muses.