their tents or in their houses, they offered a woman of the family, and most often a wife of the host himself. The young girls alone were exempt from this strange service. It was considered the duty of the traveller to conform with a good grace to the custom, otherwise he was hooted and chased from the village or camp by the women and children. This extreme manner of understanding hospitality was very ancient and deeply rooted, and it was not without difficulty that the conquering Wahabites brought the Asyrs to renounce it.[1] But these customs were not specially confined to the Asyrs; they were in force throughout prehistoric Arabia. An old Arab writer, Ibn al Moghawir, mentions them. "Sometimes," he says, "the wife was actually placed at the disposition of the guest; at other times, the offer was only symbolic. The guests were invited to press the wife in their arms, and to give her kisses, but the poignard would have revenged any further liberties."[2] It is not very long since the same practice prevailed in Kordofan and Djebel-Taggale.[3] Certain traits of morals related by the Greco-Latin writers show that in Rome, and Greece also, if it was not the husband's duty to lend his wife to his friends, he had at least the right to do so. At Sparta, Lycurgus authorised husbands to be thus liberal with their wives whenever they judged their friends worthy of this honour. And, further, the public opinion of Sparta strongly approved the conduct of an aged husband who took care to procure for his wife a young, handsome, and virtuous substitute.[4]
The same customs prevailed at Athens, where Socrates, it is said, lent his wife Xantippe to his friend Alcibiades; and at Rome,[5] where the austere Cato the elder gave up his wife Marcia to his friend Hortensius, and afterwards took her back, much enriched, it is true, at the death of this friend.
All these facts relate, therefore, to a very widely-spread and almost universal custom, which is in perfect accord
