position as the leader of Athenian society during his tenure of power, an important page is devoted in all histories of Greece; and it appears that even matrons were permitted to frequent her salon in order to improve themselves mentally by listening to the elevated discourses held there.[1] Socrates visited Theodote for the purpose of augmenting his sociological insight, and Xenophon has included an account of his debate with her in his memoirs of that father of philosophers.[2] Leontium was a conspicuous figure in the garden of Epicurus, where he convened his disciples; and she penned a treatise against the Peripatetics, which deserved the commendation of Cicero.[3] Scarcely, indeed, can a man of note in this age, whether potentate, orator, philosopher, or poet, be found whose name does not occur in anecdote
- [Footnote: Athens, but their works are lost; Athenaeus, xiii, 21, 46. The first-*named
composed as many as 135 lives, and Apollodorus exceeded even this number. The gist of their writings, however, seems to have been preserved by Athenaeus in his thirteenth book; and among the moderns, Jacobs has attempted to reconstruct all the principal biographies; Attische Museum, 1798-1805. The accounts of them are almost wholly made up of anecdotes as to their witty remarks and rejoinders. But at least one modern author has written biographies of courtesans; see Devaux-Mousk, Fleurs du Persil, Paris, 1887 (with portraits and autographs).]
- ↑ Plutarch, Pericles, etc. At the same time it was not beneath her to become a procuress, and it is said that all Greece was supplied with girls by her agency. It was even maintained that the immediate cause of the Pelopennesian war was the abduction of one of these girls imported from Megara; Athenaeus, xiii, 25; Plutarch, loc. cit. Parallels to Aspasia are not altogether wanting in very recent times. Thus of Cora Pearl (née Crouch, of Plymouth) we read: "For some time she excited the greatest interest among all classes of Parisian society, and ladies imitated her dress and manners"; Dict. Nat. Biog., sb. nom.
- ↑ Memorabilia, iii, 11.
- ↑ Diogenes Laert., Epicurus; Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i, 33; see an imaginary letter of hers in Alciphron, ii, 2.
