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

THE GREEK WOMAN

the sexes might take place. Thus, in a charming idyll of Theocritus (Idyll, ii), the story is told of a a girl how, during a festal procession in the grove of Artemis, at which, “ among great numbers of other animals’ a lioness was brought on, she was fetched away by a female friend and on this occasion sees the beautiful Daphnis and falls in love with him.

Marriage brought the wife a somewhat greater freedom of movement, yet the house was, and remained, the kingdom to which she was assigned. How persistently the maxim, which in Euripides (Troades, 642) is clothed in the words “ just that brings blame upon a woman, if she will not remain at home”, was carried through during life is exemplified by the fact that, even at the news of the fearful defeat of Chaeronea, the women of Athens only ventured as far as the house-doors (Lycurgus, Leocrates, 40), where, half senseless with sorrow, they inquired after husbands, fathers, and brothersbut “‘ even that was considered unworthy of them and their city”’.

Indeed, from a passage in Hypereides (Stobeus, Ixxiv, 33) it may be conjectured that women were not free to go out until they were of such an age that a man who saw her in the street did not ask whose wife, but whose mother, that was. Hence the tortoise, on which the foot of the Aphrodite Urania of Pheidias in Elis rested (Plutarch, sis and Osiris, 76) was regarded as the symbol of the woman’s life shut up in the narrow limits of the house, “that unmarried girls in particular need to be guarded, and that housekeeping and silence befit married women.” At least the good custom forbade women showing themselves in public unless they were accompanied by a gynaekonomus (yvvaucovdpos), that is, by some older confidential male person of the household, and generally followed by a female slave. It touches us peculiarly that even Solon (Plutarch, Solon, 21) deemed such things worth regulating by law, when he ordered that

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