Note 270 — Women in Greek Comedy

It is hard for us, in our generation, to realise what the first dawn of pure love for women must have meant to the men who saw it. It needs a conscious effort of will to clean away from one’s eyes and one’s heart the dust of the centuries, and to look back clearly; but if once the effort be successfully made, it is no longer hard to understand why, at the end of the fourth century, the pure girl was a more inspiring ideal than “the woman with a past,” and why the παρθένος; could stir depths of passion that the ἑταίρα had left untouched.