These opinions of Socrates and Plato are so at variance with those of their contemporaries, and so contrary to the custom that then obtained of excluding all but free-born hetaerae from the advantages of education and culture, that we cannot but think that they were due to the profound influence which had been exercised directly or indirectly by Aspasia on both of these great philosophers. Be this as it may, neither the efforts of Aspasia nor the teachings of Socrates and Plato were able to remove the bars to intellectual development from which the women of Greece had so long suffered. A change in customs and laws concerning the rigid, oriental seclusion of women did not come until much later, and then it was under a new regime--that of the Caesars--while complete equality of men and women in school and college was not recognized until long centuries afterward. It is interesting to speculate regarding what Greece would have become had she developed her women as she developed her men. Never in the history of the world were there in any one city so many eminent men--poets, orators, statesmen, painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers--as in Athens, and yet not a single native-born Athenian woman ever attained the least distinction in any department of art or science or literature. We cannot conceive for a moment that Greece's fertility in great men and barrenness in great women was due to the fact that the mothers of such illustrious men were ordinary housewives and entirely devoid of the talent and genius which gave immortality to their distinguished sons. The careers of Aspasia and the achievements of Sappho, Corinna, Myrtides, Erinna, Praxilla, Telesilla, Myrus, Anytae and Nossidis, Theano and her daughter, to mention no others, absolutely preclude such an assumption. The women in Greece, there can be no doubt about it, were as richly endowed by nature as were the men, and only lacked the opportunities that men enjoyed to achieve, in every sphere of intellectual activity, a corresponding measure of success. They were extraordinary types, these women of ancient Greece; for among them we find the dignified Roman matron, the chatelaine of the Middle Ages, the brilliant woman of the Renaissance and the cultured mistress of the French _salon_. But all their talent, power and genius counted for naught.