They were the only educated women in Athens. They studied all the arts, became acquainted with all new philosophical speculations, and interested themselves in politics. Women who thus cultivated their minds were sure to gain the esteem of the best men in Greece. Many of them also were women of high moral character, temperate, thoughtful, and earnest, and were either unattached or attached to one man, and to all intents and purposes married. Even if they had two or three attachments, but behaved in other respects with temperance and sobriety, such was the Greek feeling in regard to their peculiar position, that they did not bring down upon themselves any censure from even the sternest of Greek moralists. One of these women[46] came to Athens when Socrates was living, and he had no scruple in conversing with her on her art, and discussing how she could best procure true friends. And, in fact, these were almost the only Greek women who exhibited what was best and noblest in woman’s nature. One of these, Diotima of Mantinea,[47] must have been a woman of splendid mind, for Socrates speaks of her as his teacher in love, when he gives utterance, in the ‘Symposium,’ to the grandest thoughts in regard to the true nature and essence of divine and eternal beauty. Almost every one of the great men of Athens had such a companion, and these women seem to have sympathized with them in their high imaginations and profound meditations. Many of them were also courageously true to their lovers. When the versatile Alcibiades had to flee for his life, it was a “companion” that went with him,[48] and, being present at his end, performed the funeral rites over him. But of all these women there is one that stands prominently forward as the most remarkable woman of antiquity, Aspasia of Miletus. We do not know what circumstance induced her to leave her native city Miletus. Plutarch[49] suggests that she was inflamed by the desire to imitate the conduct of Thargelia, another Milesian, who gained a position of high political importance by using her persuasive arts on the Greeks whom she knew, to win them over to the cause of the King of Persia. This may have been the case, but a good deal that is said about Aspasia must be received with considerable scepticism. Like Sappho, she became the subject of comedies, but, unlike Sappho, she was bitterly attacked by the comic poets and others during her lifetime. The later Greek writers were in the habit of setting down the jests of the comic writers as veritable history, and modern commentators and historians have not been entirely free from this practice. Whatever brought her to Athens, certain it is that she found her way there, and became acquainted with the great statesman Pericles. She made a complete conquest of him. He was at the time married, but there was incompatibility of temper between him and his wife. Pericles therefore made an agreement with his wife to have a divorce, and get her married