Among those who had especially distinguished themselves were Hipparchia, the wife of the philosopher Crates; Themista, the wife of Leon and a correspondent of Epicurus, who was pronounced "a sort of female Solon"; Perictione, a disciple of Pythagoras, who distinguished herself by her writings on _Wisdom_ and _The Harmony of Woman_, and Leontium, a disciple and companion of Epicurus, who wrote a work against Theophrastus, which was pronounced by Cicero a model of style. And was not the school of Pythagoras at Crotona continued after his death by his daughter and his wife, Theano? And did not this fact alone manifest woman's capacity for abstract thought, as effectively as the Lesbian school had demonstrated her talent for consummate verse?[6] But it was all to no purpose. The comparative freedom and advantages which Sappho, Corinna and their friends had enjoyed was soon--for some reason scarcely comprehensible by us--taken from all the women of Greece except the peculiar class known in history as _hetaerae_--companions. These we should now rank among the _demimonde_, but the Greek point of view was different from ours. The hetaerae were the friends and companions of the men who spent most of their time in public resorts, and they accompanied them to the gymnasium, to banquets, the games, to the theater and other similar assemblies from which the wives and daughters of the Athenians, during the golden age of Greece, were rigorously excluded. For so great was the seclusion in which the wives of the Greeks then lived that they never attended public spectacles and never left the house, unless accompanied by a female slave. They were not permitted to see men except in the presence of their husbands, nor could they have a seat even at their own tables, if their husbands happened to have male guests. It was by reason of this strict seclusion and the enforced ignorance to which they were subjected that we hear very little of the virtuous women of this period of Greek history. We have records of a few instances of filial and conjugal affection, but, outside of this, the names of the wives and daughters of even the most distinguished citizens have long since passed into oblivion. Only the hetaerae attracted public notice, and only among them, during the period to which reference is now made, do we find any women who achieved distinction by their intellectual attainments, or by the influence which they exerted over those with whom they were associated.