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

THE GREEK WOMAN

suitors! Full of nobility, every inch a queen, insulted in her woman’s honour by the riotous behaviour of her insolent admirers, she appears amongst their band flinging them back into their boundaries with words which only true womanhood can invent. How amazed she is at the change in her son Telemachus, who is ripening from a boy into a young man; she is amazed, but resigns herself, when her son calls to her (Odyssey, 1, 356-60): ‘““ Now go to thy chamber and busy thyself with thine own tasks, the loom and the distaff, and bid thy handmaids ply their tasks ; but speech shall be for men, for all, but most of all for me; since mine is the authority in the house.” Would Homer have been able to create so charming an idyll as the Nausicaa scenes, if the Greek “ young girls”’ had felt unhappy in the confinement of their domestic duties? We need only point out these facts, since the readers of this book should be sufficiently acquainted with the poems of Homer to remember the scenes of woman’s life that are given there and to correct their judgment on the position of the Greek woman of that time and on marriage. Now Aristotle (De republ., ii, 8, 1260) refers to the fact that, i Homer, the man, as it were, purchases the bride from her parents ; he pays for the hedena (€6va), the bridal presents, which consisted of natural products, mostly in cattle, which perhaps might be felt unworthy by the modern man. Yet we must point out that this custom arises from the view, current among the old ‘Teutons and Hebrews, that the unmarried daughters are a valuable possession of the household for whom an indemnity must be demanded if they are given up. Further, many passages from Homer (Odyssey, 1, 277, 1, 196; Ihad, vi, 395, ix, 144, etc.) show us how, just at the time when the handing over was completed, it was customary to give the daughters a dowry. Critical people might consider this custom, which is also usual at the present day, to be in the

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