Of women who were both virtuous and capable the orators tell us singularly little, and the probable reason is that such women in Athens had almost ceased to exist. Demosthenes and his contemporaries represent the last stage, when their country was already on the brink of political extinction, and the men of Athens had no ideals or examples of womanly virtue to encourage them in their vain struggle against the great military power of the North. The lack of good women was a fatal disaster, but it was a disaster which the Athenians had brought upon themselves, and it led them straight to ruin. XIII.—ARISTOTLE As the political life of Athens ends with Demosthenes, so the creative force of the Greek genius ceases with Aristotle. There are some brilliant and many charming writers after his time, but they rely for all the originality of their thought on their great predecessors. Aristotle is the last of the creators: ‘_tout le reste, c’est littérature_.’ Hence his unique importance in the history of human thought: not merely is he, perhaps, the greatest mind that Greece produced, but he has the advantage of coming last in the long line of thinkers on whom nearly all our intellectual life even now depends. In every department of civilised existence the influence of Aristotle must still be taken into account, and his judgment of women’s position in society—a view sincerely held and on the whole most temperately expressed—has had far more effect on the world than have the idealist theories of Plato. His statement of the moral disabilities of women is to be found best in the _Ethics_; of their social disabilities in the treatise _On Generation_. The following quotations are from the English translations of those works by Welldon, Jowett, and Platt.