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

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

circumstances even more unworthy, especially as the object is at any price to find a husband for the daughter. It is very remarkable that even in Homer (Odyssey, li, 132), in cases of a separation, the dowry reverts to the father or a relatively heavy fine must be paid. Certainly as early as Homer’s time (Odyssey, iv, 535) the wife’s unfaithfulness plays an important part; indeed, the Trojan war is entirely founded upon the supposition that Helen is unfaithful to her husband Menelaus, and follows the beautiful Phrygian King’s son, Paris, into a foreign land; and Clymtemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, the shepherd of his people, allows herself to be seduced by Aégisthus during the many years’ absence of her husband, and with the help of her paramour, after a treacherously affectionate reception, slays Agamemnon on his return, in the bath, “ like a bull in his stall.” The poet—or what is the same in this case, the naive popular view—is certainly amiable enough to exculpate the adulteresses from the guilt of these two errors of married life, and to put them down to infatuation (Odyssey, xxi, 218; Iliad, iii, 164, 399) caused by Aphrodite, more particularly due to the action of the powers of destiny (Odyssey, iii, 265) that secretly govern the house of the Tantalide; but this in no way alters the fact that both the commanders-in-chief in the mighty struggle of the people, the poetical expression of which is preserved in Homer’s //zad and Odyssey, are deceived husbands in the traditional account reproduced by the poet (Odyssey, xi, 424). ‘Thus it 1s easy to understand why the shade of Agamemnon, murdered by the base cunning of a woman, bitterly abuses the female sex, thereby opening the list of women-haters so numerous in Greek culture, of which we shall speak later. ‘‘ But she, the shameless one, turned her back upon me and, even though I was going to the house of Hades, deigned neither to draw down my eyelids with her fingers nor to close my mouth. So true