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

THE GREEK WOMAN

in the evening they questioned the men who passed by.

Here, if ever, the saying holds good, that extremes meet. Many shut up their women in the gynaekonttis (women’s room) well guarded, sealed and bolted, on the threshold of which a rough Molossian hound (Aristoph., Thesmoph., 414) was made to keep watch, while on the contrary, according to Herodotus (i, 93), in Lydia it was thought nothing of if the girls paid for their clothes by prostitution. While the Spartan girls appeared in the costume often derided by the rest of Greece, which slit the dress to the hips, so that the thigh was bared while walking along, in Athens, according to Aristophanes (Thesmoph., 797) himself, even the married woman was obliged to retire into the interior of the house, to avoid being seen through the window by a male passer-by.

It has been asserted that the great retirement in which the Greek woman in general certainly lived led to a simplicity of character and mental narrowness, and in support of this appeal is made to anecdotes and stories something like that related of the wite of King Hiero (Plutarch, De inimicorum utilitate, 7). Having been ridiculed by an opponent for the bad smell of his mouth, the king ran home in a rage and asked his wife why she had not drawn his attention to it. The wife is said to have answered, as an honest and modest wife should: ‘“‘ I thought that all men smelt like that.” Certainly several anecdotes of the kind could be quoted, but their conclusiveness, assuming their correctness generally, is slight, not so much since the Greeks were a people who were fond of anecdotes, but rather since the universally high respect which Greek men had for their wives, and of which numerous indisputable instances have been handed down to us, cannot possibly have concerned only the sexual and childbearing function of the wife. One thing certainly we must not expect to find in the Greek husband—

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