That the absolute seclusion and chaperonage of the young women, and
their consequent ignorance and insipidity, were the reasons why they
could neither feel nor inspire Romantic Love, is shown by the fact that
there existed in Greece in the time of Perikles a mentally superior
class of women who appear to have aroused Love, or something very like
it, by means of the artistic and intellectual charms which they united
with their physical beauty. These women were called Ἡταίραι, or
_companions_, evidently to distinguish them from the domestic women who
were no “companions” after the first charm of novelty had worn away: a
state of affairs for which of course the men themselves, who gave them
no education and locked them up, were to blame.
What seems paradoxical is that these women, who were morally inferior to
the others, should have been the first to inspire in men a more
_refined_ sort of Love; but the paradox is rendered the more probable by
the circumstance that in India, likewise, we found the first traces of
Romantic Love among the Bayaderes, a class corresponding to the Hetæræ.
There is reason to believe that Aspasia, who aided the greatest
statesman of antiquity in writing his stirring speeches, inspired not
only him but other great contemporaries with true Romantic passion—which
they were enabled to feel because men of genius are not only
intellectually but also emotionally ahead of their time.
Diotima was another of these women. She was also revered as a
prophetess, and is credited by Plato with having given Sokrates, and
through him Greece, the first adequate discourse on Love—a discourse, we
may add, in which some flashes of true modern insight are mingled with
the curiously confused notions of the Greeks on the subject of Love and
Friendship. What these notions were is best seen by briefly considering
the peculiarities of