THE HETÆRÆ
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