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

MARRIAGE CUSTOMS

little face of the poor girl, as Euclio in the Aulularia (ii, 2) of Plautus expresses it in coarse comedy: “Now here’s the way it strikes me, Megadorus : you’re a rich man, a man of position, but as for me, I’m poor, awfully poor. Now if I was to marry off my daughter to you, it strikes me you’d be the ox and I’d be the donkey. When I was hitched up with you and couldn’t pull my share of the load, down I’d drop, I, the donkey, in the mud, and you, the ox, wouldn’t pay any more attention to me than if Pd never been born at all. You would be too much for me ; and my own kind would haw-haw at me ; and if there should be a falling out, neither party would let me have stable quarters; the donkeys would chew me up and the oxen would run me through. It is a very hazardous business for donkeys to climb into the ox set.”

That young people before betrothal saw much of each other or became more intimately acquainted, is very improbable, which is already shown by the fact that Plato,! in order to prevent mutual deception as far as possible, speaks in favour of a freer intercourse between the two contracting parties, a demand which would be superfluous if such had already existed in practice. So, then, it is easy to understand that the husband very soon regarded marriage as a heavy fetter, and that the young wife was only too rapidly disappointed, as Sophocles (Tereus, frag. 524; TGF., Nauck) once touchingly expresses it: “‘ Now I am nothing and left alone ; I have often observed that such is the lot of womankind—that we are a mere nothing. When we are young, in our father’s house, I think we live the sweetest life of all; for ignorance ever brings us up delightfully. But when we have reached a mature age and know more, we are driven out of doors and sold, away from the gods of our fathers and our

+ Laws VI, 771. Plato even demands that young people before betrothal should see each other naked, ‘‘so far at least as decency permits”’. This may have happened here and there in individual cases, but can hardly have become a publicly recognized custom.