to possess—­a highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence.”  It is even possible that the movement for woman’s right which, as we dimly divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in the fourth century B.C., was led by hetairae.  According to Ivo Bruns (Frauenemancipation in Athen, 1900, p. 19) “the most certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement.”  It was the existence of this movement which made Plato’s ideas on the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us.  It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy.  Ninon de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman’s rights.  Aphra Behn who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at large.

These refinements of prostitution may be said to be chiefly the outcome of the late and more developed stages in civilization.  As Schurtz has put it (Altersklassen und Maennerbuende, p. 191):  “The cheerful, skilful and artistically accomplished hetaira frequently stands as an ideal figure in opposition to the intellectually uncultivated wife banished to the interior of the house.  The courtesan of the Italian Renaissance, Japanese geishas, Chinese flower-girls, and Indian bayaderas, all show some not unnoble features, the breath of a free artistic existence.  They have achieved—­with, it is true, the sacrifice of their highest worth—­an independence from the oppressive rule of man and of household duties, and a part of the feminine endowment which is so often crippled comes in them to brilliant development.  Prostitution in its best form may thus offer a path by which these feminine characteristics may exert a certain influence on the development of civilization.  We may also believe that the artistic activity of women is in some measure able to offer a counterpoise to the otherwise less pleasant results of sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of the emotional life; in his Magda Sudermann has described a type of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize.”  In his Sex and Character, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a fundamental and essential part of life, a permanent feminine type.