The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of restriction. One of these was the rise of the class of _hetæræ_ and the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud. Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous of the _hetæræ_, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that led the Athenians to put her on trial. It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife Hipparchia to think. Epicurus--who was not the hedonist so many imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher--opened his quiet garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this only an admission of woman's equal capacity for culture and demand for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the great writers expressly consider it. Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women; but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband. Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle, or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.