The important corollary follows, from all this, that in countries
where women receive no education sensual love is the only kind men can
feel toward them. Oriental women are of that kind, and so were the
ancient Greeks. The Greeks are indeed renowned for their statuary, yet
their attitude toward personal beauty was of a very peculiar kind.
Their highest ideal was not the feminine but the masculine type, and
accordingly we find that it was toward men only that they professed to
feel a noble passion. The beauty of the women was regarded merely from
a sensual point of view. Their respectable women were deliberately
left without education, wherefore their charms can have been at best
of a bodily kind and capable of inspiring love of body only. There is
a prevalent superstition that the Greeks of the day of Perikles had a
class of intelligent women known as hetairai, who were capable of
being true companions and inspirers of men; but I shall show, in a
later chapter, that the mentality of these women has been ludicrously
exaggerated; they were coarse and obscene in their wit and
conversation, and their morals were such that no man could have
respected them, much less loved them with a pure affection; while the
men whom they are supposed to have inspired were in most cases
voluptuaries of the most dissolute sort.