This state of matters had a powerful effect on the wives. Many of them consoled themselves in their loneliness with copious draughts of unmixed wine. They often made assignations through their slaves, and were fond of stealing out of the house whenever they could find an opportunity. And faithlessness, though the punishment was so terrible, was not uncommon. In fact their human nature could not bear the strain laid upon it. No doubt there were many among them who were good and faithful wives, and we must not always judge Southern girls by our Northern constitutions of body and soul. I have known a Greek girl who attained to peerless beauty before she was fourteen. Every feature was perfect, her dark eyes twinkled at one time with the wildest merriment, at another gazed with a strange and weird-like melancholy as if into infinite darkness. She could speak fluently four languages, and she had read largely in the literatures of each. And when I came upon her in her sad melancholy moods, she would tell me that she was puzzled with the mystery of life, and was wondering what it all meant. I have no doubt there were many such girls in old Athens, and many an Athenian wife could discuss the highest subjects with her husband. In fact, it is scarcely possible to conceive that such a marvellous crop of remarkable men, renowned in literature and art, could have arisen if all the Athenian mothers were ordinary housewives. But circumstances certainly were exceedingly unfavourable to them; and though there never was in the history of the world such a numerous race of great thinkers, poets, sculptors, painters, and architects, in one city at one time as in Athens, not one Athenian woman ever attained to the slightest distinction in any one department of literature, art, or science. “Great,” says Pericles, in the famous funeral oration which Thucydides[45] puts into his mouth, “is the glory of that woman who is least talked of among the men, either in the way of praise or blame.” And this glory the Athenian women attained to perfection.