Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

called us adulteresses in disposition, lovers of men, wine-bibbers, traitresses, gossips, masses of wickedness, great pests to men. So that, as soon as they come home from the theatre-benches, they look askance at us, and straightway search, lest any paramour be concealed in the closet. And we are no longer able to do any of those things we used to—such suspicion has Euripides taught our husbands, so that, if any woman even weave a crown she is thought to be in love, and if she let fall any vessel while roaming about the house her husband asks her in whose honour is the pot broken ?—it must be for the Corinthian stranger ! Is any girl sick? straightway her brother says, ‘ This colour in the girl does not please me.’ Well, does any woman, lacking children, wish to substitute a child, it is not possible even for this to go undiscovered; for now their husbands sit on their very beds! And Euripides has calumniated us to the old men who heretofore used to marry girls, and now no rich old man is willing to marry us—all through his verse: ‘An old man weds a tyrant, not a wife’ (Phenix). In the next place, through him they now put seals and bolts upon the women’s apartments, guarding us; and, moreover, they keep Molossian dogs—a terror to lovers! We might, my friends, put up with all this, but now our little perquisites—our right as housewives to pick out and take barley meal, oil, and wine—even this is no longer permitted us!”

The objection certainly suggests itself that all these passages prove nothing or only very little concerning the Greek conception of marriage and women generally, since they are for the most part taken from comedy, which, as is well known, does not represent actual life, but its grotesquely distorted reflection. Certainly ; yet comedy does not create any completely new views, but caricatures and exaggerates only what is ready to hand, so that comedy also may very well be considered as a

74