All this points to a strong probability that the gifted Milesian came to Athens to teach rhetoric and other arts of which she was mistress, as a Frenchwoman might seek her fortune in our own country to-day. But she had not the same immunity from criticism, as the very fact of her talents, and her ability to utilize them, sufficed to put her under a cloud. This, too, might account for the wicked things Aristophanes said of her, but we cannot imagine that Socrates would have advised his friends to send their sons to her for training had they been true. He knew her well, had profited by her instructions, and no one will charge him with gallantry or the disposition to give undue praise. He was essentially a truth-seeker. It is a matter of note, too, that the philosophers had only pleasant words for Aspasia. Her detractors were the satirists and comic poets; but who ever went to either for justice or truth? She was clear-sighted, penetrating, and versed not only in letters but in civil affairs, so it was easy enough to say that she was the power behind the throne in the Samian and Peloponnesian wars. It is certain, however, that Pericles was too wise a statesman to be led into a war by any one against his judgment. It is quite likely that she had young girls in her house who came to be instructed in the refinements and amenities of life, as poetic maidens had flocked to Sappho from all the isles of the sea a century or so before. This again was a fruitful source of calumny and satire. But it is impossible to read the Attic comedians without a conviction that they measured every one by their own moral standards, which were of the lowest and coarsest. A woman who could discuss philosophy with Socrates and Anaxagoras, art with Phidias, poetry with Sophocles and Euripides, politics and history with Thucydides, if occasion offered, and affairs of the gay world with the young Alcibiades, was not likely to escape the tongue of scandal among people who numbered the silent subjection of women among their most sacred traditions.