to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus a Pericles, at the
zenith of his powers, facing difficulties which strained and developed
all his forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman, bound hand and
foot by conventions and immured in her house in Athens. But a man is
only half a complete human being, and the other half cannot be furnished
by a weak and ignorant kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond. Hence
the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles
away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to
find the completion of his life.

In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to
be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of
whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these,
Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was
no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in
whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates,
Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides.

This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving
wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in
eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and
woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law,
lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests
its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.
So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into
the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the
decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic
Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the
deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace,
bourgeoisie in power.