After Plato's time, accordingly, we find many women engaged in the study of philosophy, not only among the Academicians, but also in the other philosophical schools, especially the Cyrenaic, the Megarian, and the Epicurean. The Peripatetic and the Stoic doctrines seem not to have appealed to the fair sex.
Alexander's empire, in overthrowing the exclusive State laws of the various cities, accomplished much for the emancipation of women, and from that time forward we find women engaged in almost all the branches of the higher learning. In Alexandria, especially, the daughters of scholars pursued studies in philosophy, in philology, and in archaeology, and some of them became celebrated. In the Græco-Roman period, Plutarch was a constant advocate of female education, and the circle of learned women that he has made known to us indicates how general was the spread of education among the women of his day.
Aspasia had set the fashion for hetaaræ in Athens to devote attention to rhetoric and philosophy; consequently, many of the blue-stockings of Greece belonged to the hetæra class. Some acquaintance with the higher learning, however, became fashionable also in the retirement of the gynæceum, and many maidens and matrons of honorable station employed their leisure moments in reading the works of philosophers and poets, and received, if not public, at least private instruction from professional lecturers.
The variety of intellectual pursuits among the women was marked. Poetry was their natural field, and philosophy appealed to them as being the most learned vocation of the times. Even in the Heroic Age, women were skilled in the uses of plants for purposes of witchcraft and of healing; and in historic times, when medicine became a science, women engaged in various medical pursuits. Similar tastes led many also to follow the different branches of natural science, and in Alexandrian times, when philology was the prevailing study, history and grammar and literary criticism became favorite studies with the daughters of the learned.
In a previous chapter, we have described the Lesbian Sappho's seminary of the Muses, to which maidens flocked from all Hellenic lands for the study of poetry and art. The natural beauties of the isle of Lesbos, the luxurious life of the aristocratic classes, the brilliancy and zeal of Sappho herself, and her ardent affection for her girl friends, were influences favorable to the pursuits of the Muses and the Graces.
It is not surprising that, amid such surroundings and with such a teacher, women should acquire a love of poetry and of all that appeals to the æsthetic nature. There is a vague tradition that there were seventy-six women poets among the Ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, the names of but few of these are preserved to us. We have authentic information concerning only the nine most distinguished poetesses, to whom the Greeks gave the title of the Terrestrial Muses.
The second of the nine Terrestrial Muses--for Sappho was, of course, the first--was the poetess's favorite and most promising pupil, Erinna of the isle of Telos. She aroused among Greek poets a most respectful and tender sentiment, and they frequently sounded her praises. Her most noted production was a poem called The Distaff, and the poets compared it to the honeycomb, which the gracious bee had gathered from the flowers of Helicon; they perceived in this production of a maiden the freshness and perfume of spring, and they likened her delicate notes to the sweet voice of a swan as he sings his death song--a comparison only too just, for she died at the tender age of nineteen years. A poet of the Anthology thus laments her untimely taking-off:
"These are Erinna's songs: how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years:--
Yet stronger far than what most men can write: