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

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

It is not the task of this book to speak in detail on the further duties of the wife—the supervision of the movable and immovable property of the house, of the male and female slaves, the kitchen, the nursing of the sick, and whatever else still constitutes the domain of the wife.

The view that the Greek wife was always the miserable Cinderella condemned to the monotony of the kitchen, while the husband was the absolute master of the house, would be far from the truth. “You cannot drive out human nature with a pitchfork,” says Horace in a well-known passage (Epuzst., i, 10, 24), and this also holds good of the Greek woman. ‘The nature of woman can never deny itself—in any people or at any time. There were three factors especially which assisted the woman in the happier times of Hellenism in sometimes obtaining physical and moral superiority over the man: occasional intellectual superiority, or inborn lust of power supported by feminine refinement, or a too extravagant dowry. As an example of this we may perhaps quote Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, whose name has unjustly become proverbial—for she was an excellent housewife and never overstepped the limits appointed for her ; and yet shrews can have been by no means rare, as is clear from the fact that in mythology, the truest mirror of the soul of the people, a prototype was created for her in the Lydian queen Omphale, who degrades Heracles, the greatest and most glorious of the Greek heroes, to the humiliating position of a vassal, so that he, dressed in woman’s attire, does female handiwork at her feet while she wears the lion’s skin and swings the club over the hero cowering at her side, placing her slippered foot upon his mighty neck (Aristoph., Lysistr., 657 ; Anth. Pal., x, 55; Lucian, Dial. Deor., 13, 2). Thus the slipper became a symbol of the deplorable condition of the married man, who is under “ petticoat-government”’, The slipper, indeed, became