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

THE GREEK WOMAN

is it that there is nothing more dread or more shameless than a woman who puts into her heart such deeds, even as she too devised a monstrous thing, contriving death for her wedded husband. Verily I thought that I should come home welcome to my children and to my slaves; but she, with her heart set upon utter wickedness, has shed shame on herself and on women yet to be, even upon her that doeth uprightly.”

Menelaus takes the matter less tragically. After the fall of Troy he becomes reconciled to his runaway wife, and in the Odyssey we find him living peacefully and highly honoured in his ancestral kingdom of Sparta by the side of Helen, who by no means feels any embarrassment in speaking about the “misery”? which Aphrodite has caused her (Odyssey, iv, 261).

‘“T groaned for the blindness that Aphrodite gave me, when she led me thither from my dear native land, forsaking my child and my bridal chamber, and my husband, a man who lacked nothing, whether in wisdom or in comeliness.”’

Not in Homer, but in the poets of the so-called Epic Cycle (especially Lesches, frag. 16), we find the story that Menelaus, after the conquest of Troy, wanted satisfaction for his insulted honour and threatened Helen with drawn sword. ‘Then she bared “ the apples of her bosom ” and so enchanted Menelaus, that he repented and threw away the sword and folded the beautiful woman in his arms in token of reconciliation—an agreeable story, which later writers, such as Euripides (Andromache, 628) and the lyric writer Ibycus (PLG., frag. 35) were fond of repeating. It was eagerly seized upon by comedy (Aristoph., Lysistr., 155; Scholiast on Wasps, 714), and also became a favourite subject in vase-paintings (see Roscher Lexikon der Mythoiogie, 1, 1970).

It must not be forgotten that everything that has hitherto been said concerning marriage in Homeric

25