Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/212

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yielded or negotiated in infancy, the pride of caste and the care for wealth outweighing all other considerations, proclaim loudly enough that matrimonial legislation in India has been the regulation, for the man's profit only, of instincts of a very low order.


IV. Marriage in Ancient Greece.

In primitive Greece the position of woman was little better. On one hand, the Iliad tells us that the epithet "woman" thrown at a man was the most contemptuous insult;[1] on the other hand, we have seen that the girl was purchased by the husband, either by presents or by services rendered to the father;[2] in short, that the husband might have domestic concubines with the sole reservation that their children did not inherit from him.[3] In the first chant of the Odyssey the severe apostrophe of Telemachus to his mother proves also that in the absence of the husband the wife was humbly submissive to her sons. "Go to thy chamber; attend to thy work; turn the spinning wheel; weave the linen; see that thy servants do their tasks. Speech belongs to men, and especially to me, who am the master here."[4] Penelope, like a well-trained woman, meekly allows herself to be silenced and obeys, "bearing in her mind the sage discourse of her son."

In later times the virtuous woman was shut up in the gyneceum, where she could only receive her parents or the friends authorised by her husband.[5] She was not even admitted to festivities. But, while the wife was semi-cloistered in the conjugal house, the husband could at will frequent and court the hetaïræ ([Greek: hetairai]), and the strangers ([Greek: xenai]) with whom the citizens of Athens had not the jus connubii, and who were not admitted like the well-born or native Athenian woman ([Greek: eleuthera]) to the thesmophors.[6]

It is evident that at Athens primitive marriage was regulated by the man with very little heed to the tastes or preferences of the woman. At Sparta it was the

  1. Iliad, ii., vii., viii.
  2. Goguet, Orig. des Lois, t. ii. p. 60.
  3. Odyssey, xiv.
  4. Ibid. i.
  5. Cavallotti, La Sposa di Menecle (notes), p. 246.
  6. Id., ibid. p. 239.