imagination as well as the senses, and which has so often made willing
slaves of the proud rulers of the world. In fact Cleonice, the
daughter of Diagoras, had enjoyed those advantages of womanly
education wholly unknown at that time to the freeborn ladies of Greece
proper, but which gave to the women of some of the isles and Ionian
cities their celebrity in ancient story. Her mother was of Miletus,
famed for the intellectual cultivation of the sex, no less than for
their beauty--of Miletus, the birthplace of Aspasia--of Miletus,
from which those remarkable women who, under the name of Hetaerae,
exercised afterwards so signal an influence over the mind and manners
of Athens, chiefly derived their origin, and who seem to have inspired
an affection, which in depth, constancy, and fervour, approached to
the more chivalrous passion of the North. Such an education consisted
not only in the feminine and household arts honoured universally
throughout Greece, but in a kind of spontaneous and luxuriant
cultivation of all that captivates the fancy and enlivens the leisure.
If there were something pedantic in their affectation of philosophy,
it was so graced and vivified by a brilliancy of conversation, a charm
of manner carried almost to a science, a womanly facility of softening
all that comes within their circle, of suiting yet refining each
complexity and discord of character admitted to their intercourse,
that it had at least nothing masculine or harsh. Wisdom, taken lightly
or easily, seemed but another shape of poetry. The matrons of Athens,
who could often neither read nor write--ignorant, vain, tawdry, and
not always faithful, if we may trust to such scandal as has reached
the modern time--must have seemed insipid beside these brilliant
strangers; and while certainly wanting their power to retain love,
must have had but a doubtful superiority in the qualifications that
ensure esteem. But we are not to suppose that the Hetaerae (that
mysterious and important class peculiar to a certain state of society,