is “absolutely no evidence” that women in general received the compliment and benefit of an education.  The poems of Philetas and Callimachus, like those of Propertius and Ovid, so far as they referred to women, appealed only to the wanton hetairai.  As late as our first century Plutarch felt called upon to write a treatise, oti kai gunaikas paideuteon—­“that women too should be educated.”  Cornelius Nepos still speaks of the gynaikonitis as the place where women spend their time.

“In particular, the emancipation of virgins from the seclusion of their jealous confinement would have implied a revolution in all social arrangements of the Greeks of which we have no intimation anywhere,”

including Alexandria (69).  In another chapter, Rohde comments (354-356) with documentary proof, on the “extraordinary tenacity,” with which the Greeks down to the latest periods of their literature, clung to their custom of regarding and treating women as inferiors and servants—­a custom which precluded the possibility of true chivalry and adoration.  That sympathy also—­and consequently true, altruistic affection—­continued to be wanting in their emotional life is indicated by the fact, also pointed out by Rohde, that “the most palpable mark of a higher respect,” an education, was withheld from the women to the end of the Hellenic period.[317]

THE NEW COMEDY

Another current error regarding the Alexandrian period both in Egypt and in Greece (Menander and the New Comedy) is that a regard for purity enters as a new element into its literature.  It does, in some instances, less, however, as a virtue than as a bonne bouche for epicures,[318] as is made most patent in that offshoot of the Alexandrian manner, the abominably raffine story of Daphnis and Chloe.  There may also be traces of that “longing for an ennobling of the passion of love” of which Rohde speaks (though I have not found any in my own reading, and the professor, contrary to his favorite usage, gives no references); but apart from that, the later Greek literature differs from the older not in being purer, but by its coarse and shameless eroticism, both unnatural and natural.  The old epics and tragedies are models of purity in comparison, though Euripides set a bad example in his Hippolytus, and still more his Aeolus, the coarse incestuous passion of which was particularly admired and imitated by the later writers.[319] Aristophanes is proverbial for his unspeakable license and obscenity.  Concerning the plays of Menander (more than a hundred, of which only fragments have come down to us and Latin versions of several by Terence and Plautus), Plutarch tells us, indeed, that they were all tied together by one bond—­love; but it was love in the only sense known to the Greeks, and always involving a hetaira or at most a [Greek:  pseudokorae] or demie-vierge, since respectable girls could not be involved in realistic Greek love-affairs.