still more than this artificiality and lack of inspiration is the effeminate degradation of the masculine type most admired.  Helbig, who, in his book on Campanische Wandmalerei, enforces the testimony of literature with the inferences that can be drawn from mural paintings and vases, remarks (258) that the favorite poetic ideals of the time are tender youths with milk-white complexion, rosy cheeks and long, soft tresses.  Thus is Apollo represented by Callimachus, thus even Achilles by the bucolic poets.  In later representations indicating Alexandrian influences we actually see Polyphemus no longer as a rude giant, but as a handsome man, or even as a beardless youth.[324]

That the Alexandrian period, far from marking the advent of purity and refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the hetairai played in social life.  In Alexandria and at Athens they were the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men, and to some of them great honors were paid.  In the time of Polybius the most beautiful houses in Alexandria were named after flute girls; portrait statues of such were placed in temples and other public places, by the side of those of generals and statesmen, and there were few prominent men whose names were not associated with these creatures.

The opinion has been promulgated countless times that these [Greek:  hetairai] were a mentally superior class of women, and on the strength of this information I assumed, in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (79), that, notwithstanding their frailty, they may have been able, in some cases, to inspire a more refined, spiritual sort of love than the uneducated domestic women.  A study of the original sources has now convinced me that this was a mistake.  Aspasia no doubt was a remarkable woman, but she stands entirely by herself, Theodota is visited once by Socrates, but he excuses himself from calling again, and as for Diotima, she is a seeress rather than a hetaira.  Athenaeus informs us that some of these women

“had a great opinion of themselves, paying attention to education and spending a part of their time on literature; so that they were very ready with their rejoinders and replies;”

but the specimens he gives of these rejoinders and replies consist chiefly of obscene jokes, cheap puns on names or pointless witticisms.  Here are two specimens of the better kind, relating to Gnathaena, who was famed for her repartee: 

“Once, when a man came to see her and saw some eggs on a dish, and said, ‘Are these raw, Gnathaena, or boiled?’ she replied, ‘They are made of brass, my boy.’” “On one occasion, when some poor lovers of the daughter of Gnathaena came to feast at her house, and threatened to throw it down, saying that they had brought spades and mattocks on purpose; ‘But,’ said Gnathaena, ’if you had these implements, you should have pawned