The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

Greek Woman

(From a vase)

“But when Callias came, a rich Athenian who had fallen in love with Elpinice, and begged that he might pay her father’s fine for him, she consented, and her brother Cimon gave her to Callias for a wife. So much is certain that Cimon loved his wife Isodice too passionately and made himself too unhappy over her death, if one may judge by the elegies composed for his consolation.”

Only we must not think that such a passion was “romantic” in the modern sense; its birth was more natural and sensual, and it did not rise to a transcendent deification of the beloved. Sometimes it may well have happened that love put in an appearance after marriage, as in The Mother-in-law of Terence, where Pamphilus, attracted by the noble qualities of the wife he once despised, gradually becomes untrue to his mistress. The peculiarly prosaic and cool relations that existed between man and wife, along with the leading motive for marriage, is most clearly expressed in a document of the highest interest to the historian of morals, the speech against the courtesan Neæra, which is attributed to Demosthenes. “Mistresses,” he says, “are kept for pleasure, and housekeepers for daily attendance and personal service; but a man marries a woman that he may beget legitimate children, of the same station on both sides, and have a faithful guardian in the house.”

Companionable intercourse between man and wife was necessarily hindered by the sharp division between their occupations, and reduced itself, no doubt, to very few hours in the day. “Because,” Ischomachus says, “it is better for a woman to stay in than to be away from home, whereas it is ignominious for a man to stay at home and not concern himself with what is going on in the world.” So, in the same piece of Xenophon, Socrates says to Aristobulus: “Is there any one to whom you talk less than to your wife?” And the disciple answers, “No one, or at least very few.” We learn, however, from comedies and other sources, that in reality things did not wear so sorry an aspect, and that feminine curiosity and jealousy led to all sorts of questions and talks. On the other hand, there was no question of any intercourse with other men; in fact a wife withdrew if her husband, by chance, brought a guest home with him. If the husband were not at home it would have been reckoned a gross incivility for another man to enter the house. Indeed, Demosthenes mentions a case where a friend, who had been summoned by a servant for help, did not venture into the house because the master was away. So what Cornelius Nepos says about the Greek woman is true: “She does not appear at dinner except among relatives; she stays in the inner part of the house where no one is admitted but her nearest kinsmen.”

Euripides, indeed, went so far as to forbid the visits of women among themselves, for he writes in the Andromache: “Never, never—for I do not say it only for this one occasion—ought intelligent men, who are married, to allow other women to visit their wives, for they are the teachers of wickedness. One corrupts the marriage because she gains something by it, another wants a companion in sinning.” But things were not so bad on the whole in this respect either. In the Regiment of Women, by Aristophanes, a neighbour says to Blephyrus, who misses his wife when he gets up in the morning, “What can it be? Do you think one of her friends has asked her to breakfast, perhaps?” And the husband answers, “I think that must be it. After all, she is not so bad as that comes to, so far as I know.”

Phidias symbolised the solitariness of the home-keeping wife by the tortoise, on whose back he set the statue of Aphrodite Urania in Elis. But the acutest note of women’s relations to the outer world is in the Thesmophoriazusæ of Aristophanes, where the women speak themselves: “If we are an evil, why do you marry us, and allow us neither to go out, nor to be caught looking from the windows, and insist on guarding the evil with so much care? And if a woman goes out and you find her before the door, you get into a rage, whereas you ought to be pleased and bring a thank offering, if you were really rid of the evil and did not find her sitting there any more when you came home. Then when we take a peep out of the window every man wants to look at the evil, and when one blushes and draws in one’s head, they all want all the more to see the evil peep out.” Even on occasions when fear and necessity would break through conventional restrictions, we find the women going no farther than the door of the house; and the orator Lycurgus actually complains because after the battle of Chæronea, the women inquired after the fate of their own men-folk from their doorways.