A second method of rendering the son of a foreign woman legitimate was by decree of the Athenian Assembly: and it was probably in this way that Pericles, the son of Aspasia, became an Athenian citizen with full rights. There was a third way, not acknowledged by law, by which many such children must have found their way into the ranks of citizens. The ordinary process by which a legitimate child came to the possession of his full rights was by his being presented by his father to the _phratria_ and acknowledged by the φράτερες as a genuine member of their class or brotherhood. The father had to swear that the child was his legitimate child. In many cases fathers had no difficulty in swearing that children born to them of a beloved stranger were legitimate, and the φράτερες doubtless winked at the deception. This was specially the practice with the aristocratic party. In earlier times there had been no such strict law as afterwards prevailed in the democratic period. Indeed, the theory seems to have been held that the blood of a mother could not affect the purity of the birth of a child, because there was really nothing of the mother in the child. She had nothing to do with the production of the child. She was merely its recipient and nurse. Æschylus has very strongly expressed this idea in the ‘Eumenides,’ and we have good reason for thinking that the opinion was held by large numbers of the aristocratic party to the end. It was Pericles that established the law that the child to be legitimate must be the son or daughter of an Athenian male citizen with full rights and an Athenian female citizen with full rights, legally betrothed to each other. It is when a distribution of corn takes place, or similar advantages are reaped, that the law is strenuously applied by the democratic party, and all the children of strangers disfranchised. But always when investigation is made many are found enjoying the privileges of citizens unchallenged, whose mothers were not genuine Athenian citizens. Themistocles was the son of a Thracian stranger, and so was the general Timotheus, according to one account. It was probably through the φρατρία that Sophocles got his favourite grandson through Theoris the Sicyonian, recognized as an Athenian citizen.[61] But though the women may have gained recognition for their children, no interest was taken in their own case, and mankind had to pay dearly for this exclusiveness.