sentiment of strict and zealous patriotism which inspired Lycurgus in all his regulations regarding marriage. The obligation of marriage was legal, like the military service. The young men were attracted to it by making them assist at the gymnastic exercises of naked young girls. "This was an incentive to marriage, and, to use Plato's expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises."[1] In the supreme interest of population, love was forced on young men, but it was for the sake of fertility. The young married couple were not allowed to meet except in secret until the first pregnancy.[2] It was praiseworthy for an old husband to lend his young wife to a handsome young man, by whom she might have a child.
In our own day it is not very rare, particularly in France, to see poor young men marry rich old women. Solon did not permit this conjugal prostitution of man at Athens. "A censor," says Plutarch, "finding a young man in the house of a rich old woman, fattening as they say a partridge fattens by his services to the female, would remove him to some young girl who wanted a husband."[3] At Sparta Lycurgus went as far as to put hardened celibates under the ban of society. In the first place, they were not permitted to see these exercises of the naked virgins; and the magistrates commanded them to march naked round the market-place in winter, and to sing a song composed against themselves. . . . They were also deprived of that honour and respect which the young pay to the old.[4]
The young Greek girl could not dispose of her person any more than the Chinese or Hindoo woman could. She was married by her father; in default of her father, by her brother of the same blood; in default of a brother, by a paternal grandfather.[5] The right of brothers who were heirs to their father to marry their sister was not even exhausted by a first marriage.[6] The father of the family had the power either to marry his daughter during his lifetime, or
