A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (_La femme dans l'antiquité Grecque_, 1901), in which he essays to vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual, of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember, however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason (_Woman in the Golden Ages_, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek woman was "bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate." That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights. As it was, her life was by no means "cheerless." Until she approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year) an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not, as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense, nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage she was restricted to the _gynecæum_, or women's quarters. One must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too, the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that roared at the comedy or seethed round the _bema_, were not lit up by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the journey to the Olympic games.