Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



some brilliant exceptions, to have been a prosaic 

 affair — mostly a matter of convenience and house- 

 keeping — the woman an underling — little of 

 the ideal attaching to the relationship of man and 

 wife. The romance of love went elsewhere. 

 The better class of free women or Hetairai were 

 those who gave a spiritual charm to the passion. 

 They were an educated and recognised body, 

 and possibly in their best times exercised a healthy 

 and discriminating influence upon the male youth. 

 The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates 

 and the advice which he gives her concerning her 

 lovers : to keep the insolent from her door, and 

 to rejoice greatly when the accepted succeed 

 in anything honourable, indicates this. That 

 their influence was at times immense the mere 

 name of Aspasia is sufficient to show ; and if 

 Plato in the Symposium reports correctly the word 

 of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human 

 and divine love was probably of the noblest and 

 profoundest that has ever been given to the 

 world. 



With the influx of the North-men over Europe 

 came a new ideal of the sexual relation, and the 

 wife mounted more into equality with her husband 

 than before. The romance of love, however, still 

 went mainly outside marriage, and may, I believe, 

 be traced in two chief forms — that of Chivalry, 

 as an ideal devotion to simple Womanhood ; and 

 that of Minstrelsy, which took quite a different 

 hue, individual and sentimental — the lover and 

 his mistress (she in most cases the wife of another),. 



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