distinctions, but in the general lines taken by the Attic drama in its decadence, and the causes of this course.
In its descent from the ideal worlds of the old tragedy and comedy, the world of heroes struggling against fate and the world of uproarious burlesque, the Attic drama of contemporary life found two great obstacles to a truly profound analysis of human character—the presence of slavery and the low intellectual status of Attic free women. In a city of twenty-one thousand free citizens reposing on the labours of some four hundred thousand slaves, a city in which out of every twenty human beings you met at least eighteen would be chattels bought and sold in open market, the variety of human character which so largely arises from free diversity of social pursuits must have been greatly limited. Moreover, these limits were narrowed still farther by the almost servile dependence of Attic free women. The speeches of Isæus, which shed many interesting lights on the Attic family relations, show us that, though an Athenian could not disinherit his son nor separate his estate from his daughter, he could choose the person whom his daughter might marry; and her position when married was not greatly superior to that of the Roman wife sub manu viri. And when we turn from the forensic orator to the philosophers of Greece we meet the same dependence of women. Though Plato in his caste of guards proposes the equal treatment of the sexes, his idea of temporary marriage would hardly have suggested itself save in the degrading associations of Attic womanhood. Aristotle believed that women differed from men intellectually not only in degree but also in kind, and did not "contemplate their ever attaining more than the place of free but inferior and subject personages in the
