VIII. LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of marriage. We find little of it in Homer, where Agamemnon and Achilles frankly think of Chryseis and Briseis, even of the discouraging Cassandra, in terms of physical desire. Nausicaa, however, is a warning against toobroad a generalization, and legends as old as Homer tell of Heracles and Iola, of Orpheus and Eurydice. The lyric poets, again, talk abundantly of love, commonly in the sense of amorous appetite; stories like that which Stesichorus tells of a maiden dying for love⁹⁰ are exceptional; but when Theano, wife of Pythagoras, speaks of love as “the sickness of a longing soul,”⁹¹ we feel the authentic note of romantic rut. As refinement grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles we hear of “Love” who “rules at will the gods,”*⁹² and in Euripides many a passage proclaims Eros’ power. The later dramatists often describe a youth desperately enamored of a girl.⁹³ Aristotle suggests the real quality of romantic adoration when he remarks that “lovers look at the eyes of the beloved, in which modesty dwells.”⁹⁴

Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of “possession” or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate.⁹⁵Normally marriage is arranged by the parents as in always classic France, or by professional matchmakers,⁹⁶ with an eye not to love but to dowries. The father is expected to provide for his daughter a marriage portion of money, clothing, jewelry, and perhaps slaves.⁹⁷ This remains to its end the property of the wife, and reverts to her in case of a separation from her husband—a consideration that discourages divorce by the male. Without a dowry a girl has little chance of marriage; therefore where the father cannot give it to her the relatives combine to provide it. Marriage by purchase, so frequent in Homeric days, has by this means been inverted in Periclean Greece: in effect, as Euripides’ Medea complains,⁹⁸ the woman has to buy her master. The Greek, then, marries not for love, nor because he enjoys matrimony (for he prates endlessly about its tribulations), but to continue himself and the state through a wife suitably dowered, and children who will ward off the evil fate of an untended soul. Even with these inducements he avoids wedlock as long as he can. The letter of the law forbids him to remain single, but the law is not always enforced in Periclean days; and after him the number of bachelors mounts until it becomes one of the basic problems of Athens.⁹⁹ There are so many ways of being amused in Greece! Those men who yield marry late, usually near thirty, and then insist upon brides not much older than fifteen.¹⁰⁰ “To mate a youth with a young wife is ill,” says a character in Euripides; “for a man’s strength endures, while the bloom of beauty quickly leaves the woman’s form.”¹⁰¹

A choice having been made, and the dowry agreed upon, a solemn betrothal takes place in the home of the girl’s father; there must be witnesses, but her own presence is not necessary. Without such a formal betrothal no union is valid in Athenian law; it is considered to be the first act in the complex rite of marriage. The second act, which follows in a few days, is a feast in the house of the girl. Before coming to it the bride and bridegroom, in their separate homes, bathe in-ceremonial purification. At the feast the men of both families sit on one side of the room, the women on the other; a wedding cake is eaten, and much wine is drunk. Then the bridegroom escorts his veiled and white-robed bride—whose face he may not yet have seen—into a carriage, and takes her to his father’s dwelling amid a procession of friends and flute-playing girls, who light the way with torches and raise the hymeneal chant. Arrived, he carries the girl over the threshold, as if in semblance of capture. The parents of the youth greet the girl, and receive her with religious ceremony into the circle of the family and the worship of its gods; no priest, however, takes any part in the ritual. The guests then escort the couple to their room with an epithalamion, or marriage-chamber song, and linger boisterously at the door until the bridegroom announces to them that the marriage has been consummated.

Besides his wife a man may take a concubine. “We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure,” says Demosthenes, “concubines for the daily health of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful guardians of our homes”:¹⁰² here in one startling sentence is the Greek view of woman in the classic age. Draco’s laws permit concubinage; and after the Sicilian expedition of 415, when the roll of citizens has been depleted by war and many girls cannot find husbands, the law explicitly allows double marriages; Socrates and Euripides are among those who assume this patriotic obligation.¹⁰³ The wife usually accepts concubinage with Oriental patience, knowing that the “second wife,” when her charms wear off, will become in effect a household slave, and that only the offspring of the first wife are accounted legitimate. Adultery leads to divorce only when committed by the wife; the husband in such case is spoken of as “carrying horns” (keroesses), and custom requires him to send his wife away.¹⁰⁴ The law makes adultery by woman, or by a man with a married woman, punishable with death, but the Greeks are too lenient to concupiscence to enforce this statute. The injured husband is usually left to deal with the adulterer as he will and can—sometimes killing him inflagrante delicto, sometimes sending a slave to beat him, sometimes contenting himself with a money indemnity.¹⁰⁵

For the man divorce is simple; he may dismiss his wife at any time, without stating the cause. Barrenness is accepted as sufficient reason for divorcing a wife, since the purpose of marriage is to have children. If the man is sterile, law permits, and public opinion recommends, the reinforcement of the husband by a relative; the child born of such a union is considered to be the son of the husband, and must tend his departed soul. The wife may not at will leave her husband, but she may ask the archons for a divorce on the ground of the cruelty or excesses of her mate.¹⁰⁶Divorce is also allowed by mutual consent, usually expressed in a formal declaration to the archon. In case of separation, even where the husband has been guilty of adultery, the children remain with the man.¹⁰⁷ All in all, in the matter of sex relations, Athenian custom and law are thoroughly man-made, and represent an Oriental retrogression from the society of Egypt, Crete, and the Homeric Age.