especially of women captured after a victory. These were part of the rights of the victor; the captives were considered as booty, and shared in the same way. We have already seen in Deuteronomy that Moses authorises this barbarous practice, and that it was habitual also among the primitive Arabs. The Homeric warriors did the same, as various passages of the Iliad and Odyssey prove.
I will quote a few of them. To begin with, we find the old priest Chryses comes to offer Agamemnon a rich ransom for his daughter, and receives from the king of kings the brutal reply—"I will not set your daughter free: old age shall find her in my dwelling at Argos, far from her native land, weaving linen and sharing my bed. Go, then, and provoke me not."[1]
Thersites, speaking to Agamemnon, is still more explicit—"Son of Atreus, what more dost thou require? What wilt thou? Thy tents are full of brass and of many most beautiful women, that we give first to thee, we, Acheans, when we take a town."[2] Elsewhere, Achilles, speaking of his beloved Briseis, of whom he had been robbed, cries—"Why have the Atreides led hither this vast army? Is it not for the sake of the dark-haired Helen? Are they, then, the only men who love their wives? Every wise and good man cherishes and loves his wife. And I also loved Briseis from my heart, although she was a captive."[3]
And, a little further on, he makes a clear distinction between the slave concubine and the legitimate wife, swearing never to accept as wife a daughter of Agamemnon.
In the Odyssey, when Ulysses enters unrecognised his own house, and sees pass before him in the vestibule his female slaves, laughing and joyous as they go to play with the suitors, his feelings are not merely those of a lawful proprietor who is offended, but of a jealous man whose harem has been violated. At first he is tempted to kill these women, which he actually does a little later, and he hears "his heart cry out in his bosom, as a bitch, turning around her young ones, barks at a stranger and tries to bite him."[4]
But such customs have prevailed here and there up to
