But when we pass from her contemporaries to the Athenian comic writers, all is changed. No fewer than six comedies, written by six different poets, bore her name and exhibited her loves, and four other plays probably treated the same subject. In these she was represented as loving a poet who died before she was born, and two poets who were born after she died. But especially she fell into an infatuated love at the age of fifty for a kind of mythological young man who was gifted by Aphrodite with the power of driving any woman he liked into desperation for him. Old Sappho became desperate according to these poets, and plunged into the sea to cool this mad passion; but whether she ever reached the bottom, no comic poet or subsequent historian has vouchsafed to tell us. All these villanous stories, which gathered vileness till, as Philarète Chasles remarks, they reached a climax in Pope, seem to me indicative that she ventured on some bold innovations in regard to her own sex which shocked the Athenian mind. And perhaps confirmation is added to this by the statement in the Parian marble, though the document is often untrustworthy,[40] that she was banished and fled to Sicily. She may, indeed, have taken part in some of the numerous political movements which agitated her native island, but it seems more likely that she would give offence by trying to strike off some of the restrictions which in her opinion harassed or degraded her sex. CHAPTER V. ATHENIAN WOMEN. We come now to the Athenians. The phenomenon that presents itself here is as peculiar and striking as anything we have yet examined. In Athens we find two classes of women who were not slaves. There was one class who could scarcely move a step from their own rooms, and who were watched and restricted in every possible way. There was another class on whom no restrictions whatever were laid, who could move about and do whatever seemed good in their own eyes. And the unrestricted would, in all probability, have exchanged places with the restricted, and many of the restricted envied the freedom of the other members of their sex. We proceed to the explanation of this phenomenon.