These reasons will in some measure, account for the honors, which the votaries of Venus so often received in Greece. Otherwise we should have been at a loss to conceive, why six or seven writers had exerted their talents to celebrate the courtezans of Athens—why three great painters had uniformly devoted their pencils to represent them on canvass—and why so many poets had strove to immortalize them in verses. We should hardly have believed that so many illustrious men had courted their society—that Aspasia had been consulted in deliberations of [p23] peace and war—that Phryne had a statue of gold placed between the statues of two kings at Delphos—that, after death, magnificent tombs had been erected to their memory.
“The traveller,” says a Greek writer, “who, approaching to Athens, sees on the side of the way a monument which attracts his notice at a distance, will imagine that it is the tomb of Miltiades or Pericles, or of some other great man, who has done honor to his country by his services. He advances, he reads, and he learns that it is a courtezan of Athens who is interred with so much pomp.”
Theopompus, in a letter to Alexander the Great, speaks also of the same monument in words to the following effect—“Thus, after her death, is a prostitute honored; while not one of those brave warriors who fell in Asia, fighting for you, and for the safety of Greece, has so much as a stone erected to his memory, or an inscription to preserve his ashes from insult.”
Such was the homage which that enthusiastic people, voluptuous and passionate, paid to beauty. More guided by sentiment than reason, and having laws rather than principles, they banished their great men, honored their courtezans, murdered Socrates, permitted themselves to be governed by Aspasia, preserved inviolate the marriage bed, and placed Phryne in the temple of Apollo!
[p24]
ROMAN WOMEN.
Among the Romans, a grave and austere people, who, during five hundred years, were unacquainted with the elegancies and the pleasures of life, and who, in the middle of furrows and fields of battle, were employed in tillage or in war, the manners of the women were a long time as solemn and severe as those of the men, and without the smallest mixture of corruption, or of weakness.
The time when the Roman women began to appear in public, marks a particular era in history.
The Roman women, for many ages, were respected over the whole world. Their victorious husbands re-visited them with transport, at their return from battle. They laid at their feet the spoils of the enemy, and endeared themselves in their eyes by the wounds which they had received for them and for the state. Those warriors often came from imposing commands upon kings, and in their own houses accounted it an honor to obey. In vain the too rigid laws made them the arbiters of life and death. More powerful than the laws, the women ruled their judges. In vain the legislature, foreseeing the wants which exist only among a corrupt people, permitted divorce. The indulgence of the polity was proscribed by the manners.
Such was the influence of beauty at Rome before the licentious intercourse of the sexes had corrupted both.