How far the honor accorded to so many of the hetæræ was due to their talents and how far to their personal fascination, it is difficult to say. In many cases, beauty was their chief distinction. Some are known to have been fair and frail; others were apparently of good character as well as brilliant intellect. A poet of the time speaks of one as Pure and on virtue’s strictest model formed. It would not be quite safe, however, to measure them by our standards. We may go to the Greeks for art and literature, but not for morals. Things that we consider criminal, they looked upon as quite natural and innocent. No doubt, too, many things which we consider so harmless as to pass unnoted would have been censured by them as violations of all laws of decorum. III There was one woman, however, whose individuality was too strong to be altogether merged into that of the man with whom her name is associated. Aspasia stands supreme, after Sappho, as the most brilliant and lettered woman of classic times. The center of a circle so luminous that the ages have not greatly dimmed its radiance, she is likely to live as long as the world cherishes the memory of its greatest men. She was the prototype of the charming and intellectual women who made the literary courts of the Renaissance so famous two thousand years afterward; also of the more familiar ones who shone as leaders of the powerful salons of France a century or two later. Even to-day the aspiring woman who dreams of reviving the social triumphs of her sex recalls the golden days of Athens and wonders what magic drew so many of the great poets, statesmen, and philosophers of the world from the groves of the Academy, the colonnades of the Lyceum, the porticos, and the gymnasia, to pour their treasures of wit and thought at the feet of the fair Ionian. She may remember, too, that this fascinating woman was not only the high priestess who presided at the birth of society as we know it, but was also the first to assert the right of the wife to be educated, that she might live as the peer and companion of her husband, not as his slave.