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

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

acquainted with the best-known example through the poet Catullus (Ixvii, 67) who cannot thank his friend Allius sufficiently for his readiness to oblige : “He opened a broad track across the fenced field, he gave me access to a house and its mistress, under whose roof we should together enjoy each his own love. ‘Thither my fair goddess delicately stepped, and set the sole of her shining foot on the smooth threshold, as she pressed on her slender sandal.”

Of course, it also happened that the married man had knowledge of the amorous dodges of his wife and endured them silently ; indeed, that he gained material advantage from them, as in the speech against Neaera (wrongly ascribed to Demosthenes) the wife is obliged to defray the expenses of the housekeeping by her bodily charms. But, in the case of his wife’s being unfaithful, the husband may have obtained a divorce. It cannot be our task to enter into the legal provisions of such divorce, but it may be mentioned that separation might also take place for other reasons. Among them was incompatibility of temperament, for which Plato (Laws, vi, 784) would have liked a court of arbitration to be established ; further, childlessness, which seems quite logical, since the Greek regarded the begetting of legitimate descendants as the chief object of marriage. For this reason wives who had no children had recourse to the device of supposititious children, since, as Dion Chrysostom says (xv, 8): “Every wife would be very glad to keep her husband.” A quite natural consequence of this was that the idea of “marriage on trial” offered no impossibility. It is reported of Crates the Cynic (Diog. Laért., vi, 93) that “ according to his own confession he had handed over his daughter to be married for thirty days on trial’.

What has been hitherto said concerning Greek matriage is an attempt to combine systematically

68