Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[287] Eleusis. In individual cases, the service brought out such noble virtue as that of the priestess Theano, who, when Alcibiades was exiled from Athens and was sentenced to be cursed by all who served at the altar, alone refused to obey, saying that she was consecrated to bless and not to curse. But even among the mass of Greek women, where so much time was spent in sharing or observing this ritual of worship, life must have taken some element of elevation through contact with the great ideal women of the sky.

We cannot now know, but can only conjecture, how far the same religious influence inspired those Greek women who, in more secular spheres of duty, left their names on their country's records. When Corinna defeated Pindar in competing for the poetic prize; when Helen of Alexandria painted her great historic picture, consecrated in the Temple of Peace; when the daughter of Thucydides aided or completed her father's great literary work; when the Athenian Agnodice studied medicine, disguised as a man, and practised it as a man, and was prosecuted as a seducer, and then, revealing her sex, was prosecuted for her deception, till the chief women of Athens appeared in her behalf and secured for their sex the right to be physicians; when Telesilla of Argos roused her country-women to defend the walls against the Spartans, the men having lost courage,--after which, in a commemorative festival, the women appeared in male attire and the men came forth veiled;--all these women but put in action the lessons of aspiration which they had learned in the temples. This inspiration derived by womanly genius from its deity is finely recognized by Antipater of Thessalonica in that fine epigram where he enumerates the nine poetesses of Greece, calls them “artists of immortal ”