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

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

women, when they went out for funeral or festivals, “might take with them no more than three pieces of clothing ; further, no more than an obol’s worth (about 13d.) of food and drink,” and at night time should only go out in a carriage with a lighted lantern—rules which appear to have been still in existence in Plutarch’s days. But Solon, not unjustly called “the wise”? by the men of ancient times, certainly knew very well what he meant by such apparently unimportant orders—it is nothing else but the expression of the “ principle of the male”’, which dominates the whole of ancient culture.

It would, of course, be absurd to assume that these and similar regulations prevailed everywhere, and always in Greece to the same extent ; our only concern is to sketch the picture of culture in its broad outlines, in which we consider Greece as a unity held together by language and custom, without going painfully into the differences on every occasion, as they are conditioned by place and time, thus taking up a position which is fundamentally that of the whole book, in so far as it is not expressly contradicted. If Euripides (Andromache, 925) emphatically requires from sensible married men that they should not allow their wives to be visited by other women, since they are “teachers of everything that is bad”, he certainly does not stand alone in this view, but practice contradicted him. Thus we know that women, certainly unaccompanied by their husbands, visited the studio of Pheidias, and the court of Pyrilampes, a friend of Pericles (Plutarch, Pericles, 13), in order to admire the magnificent peacocks kept there. If the women greet Pericles after his funeral oration and heap flowers upon him (ibid., 28), it seems to follow from this that the offence which, as already mentioned, was caused by the attitude of the Athenian women after the news of the battle of Chaeronea, was mainly due to the fact that late

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