The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle attributes it to fear of overpopulation,89 and this may account for part of the phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in companionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium, ‘and palaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only the male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home; the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory; from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daughters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimulation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment France.

  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 too broad 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.95 Normally 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 in flagrante 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.106 Divorce 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.

  IX. WOMAN

  As surprising as anything else in this civilization is the fact that it is brilliant without the aid or stimulus of women. With their help the Heroic Age achieved splendor, the age of the dictators a lyric radiance; then, almost overnight, ma
rried women vanish from the history of the Greeks, as if to confute the supposed correlation between the level of civilization and the status of woman. In Herodotus woman is everywhere; in Thucydides she is nowhere to be seen. From Semonides of Amorgos to Lucian, Greek literature is offensively repetitious about the faults of women; and towards the close of it even the kindly Plutarch repeats Thucydides:108 “The name of a decent woman, like her person, should be shut up in the house.”109

  This seclusion of woman does not exist among the Dorians; presumably it comes from the Near East to Ionia, and from Ionia to Attica; it is part of the tradition of Asia. Perhaps the disappearance of inheritance through the mother, the rise of the middle classes, and the enthronement of the commercial view of life enter into the change: men come to judge women in terms of utility, and find them especially useful in the home. The Oriental nature of Greek marriage goes with this Attic purdah; the bride is cut off from her kin, goes to live almost as a menial in another home, and worships other gods. She cannot make contracts, or incur debts beyond a trifling sum; she cannot bring actions at law; and Solon legislates that anything done under the influence of woman shall have no validity at law.110 When her husband dies she does not inherit his property. Even physiological error enters into her legal subjection; for just as primitive ignorance of the male role in reproduction tended to exalt woman, so the male is exalted by the theory popular in classic Greece that the generative power belongs only to man, the woman being merely the carrier and nurse of the child.111 The older age of the man contributes to the subordination of the wife; he is twice her years when he marries her, and can in some degree mold her mind to his own philosophy. Doubtless the male knows too well the license allowed to his sex in Athens to risk his wife or daughter at large; he chooses to be free at the cost of her seclusion. She may, if properly veiled and attended, visit her relatives or intimates, and may take part in the religious celebrations, including attendance at the plays; but for the rest she is expected to stay at home, and not allow herself to be seen at a window. Most of her life is spent in the women’s quarters at the rear of the house; no male visitor is ever admitted there, nor does she appear when men visit her husband.

  In the home she is honored and obeyed in everything that does not contravene the patriarchal authority of her mate. She keeps the house, or superintends its management; she cooks the meals, cards and spins the wool, makes the clothing and bedding for the family. Her education is almost confined to household arts, for the Athenian believes with Euripides that a woman is handicapped by intellect.112 The result is that the respectable women of Athens are more modest, more “charming” to men, than their like in Sparta, but less interesting and mature, incapable of being comrades to husbands whose minds have been filled and sharpened by a free and varied life. The women of sixth-century Greece contributed significantly to Greek literature; the women of Periclean Athens contribute nothing.

  Toward the end of the period a movement arises for the emancipation of woman. Euripides defends the sex with brave speeches and timid innuendoes; Aristophanes makes fun of them with boisterous indecency. The women go to the heart of the matter and begin to compete with the hetairai in making themselves as attractive as the progress of chemistry will permit. “What sensible thing are we women capable of doing?” asks Cleonica in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. “We do nothing but sit around with our paint and lipstick and transparent gowns, and all the rest of it.”113 From 411 onward female roles become more prominent in Athenian drama, and reveal the growing escape of women from the solitude to which they have been confined.

  Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making her subjection largely unreal. The greater eagerness of the male gives woman an advantage in Greece as elsewhere. “Sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more.”114 Sometimes this natural sovereignty is enhanced by a substantial dowry, or an industrious tongue, or uxorious affection; more often it is the result of beauty, or the bearing and rearing of fine children, or the slow fusion of souls in the crucible of a common experience and task. An age that can portray such gentle characters as Antigone, Alcestis, Iphigenia, and Andromache, and such heroines as Hecuba, Cassandra, and Medea, could not be unaware of the highest and the deepest in woman. The average Athenian loves his wife, and will not always try to conceal it; the funeral stelae reveal surprisingly the tenderness of mate for mate, and of parents for children, in the intimacy of the home. The Greek Anthology is vivid with erotic verse, but it contains also many a touching epigram to a beloved comrade. “In this stone,” says one epitaph, “Marathonis laid Nicopolis, and bedewed the marble chest with tears. But it was of no avail. What profit hath a man whose wife is gone, and who is left solitary on earth?”115

  X. THE HOME

  The Greek family, like the Indo-European household in general, is composed of the father, the mother, sometimes a “second wife,” their unmarried daughters, their sons, their slaves, and their sons’ wives and children and slaves. It remains to the end the strongest institution in Greek civilization, for both in agriculture and in industry it is the unit and instrument of economic production. The power of the father in Attica is extensive, but much narrower than in Rome. He can expose the newborn child, sell the labor of his minor sons and unwedded daughters, give his daughters in marriage, and, under certain conditions, appoint another husband for his widow.116 But he cannot, in Athenian law, sell the persons of his children; and each son, on marrying, escapes from parental authority, sets up his own home, and becomes an independent member of the gene.

  The Greek house is unpretentious. The exterior is seldom more than a stout blank wall with a narrow doorway, dumb witnesses to the insecurity of Greek life. The material is sometimes stucco, usually sun-baked brick. In the city the houses are crowded together in narrow streets; often they rise to two stories, occasionally they are tenements housing several families; but nearly every citizen owns an individual home. Dwellings in Athens are small till Alcibiades sets a fashion of magnificence; there is a democratic taboo, reinforced by aristocratic precaution, against display; and the Athenian, living for the most part in the open air, does not endow the home with the significance and affection that it receives in colder zones. A rich house may have a colonnaded porch facing the street, but this is highly exceptional. Windows are a luxury, and are confined to the upper story; they have no panes, but may be closed with shutters, or screened with lattices against the sun. The entrance door is ordinarily made of double leaves, turning upon vertical pivots running into the threshold and the lintel. On the door of many well-to-do houses is a metal knocker, often in the form of a ring in a lion’s mouth.117 The entrance hallway, except in the poorer dwellings, leads into an aule, or uncovered court, commonly paved with stones. Around the court may run a columned portico; in the center may be an altar, or a cistern, or both, perhaps also adorned with columns, and paved with a mosaic floor. Light and air come to the house chiefly through this court, for upon it open nearly all the rooms; to pass from one room to another it is usually necessary to enter the portico or the court. In the shade and privacy of the court and the portico much of the family’s life is lived, and much of its work is done.

  Gardens are rare in the city, and are confined to small areas in the court or behind the house. Country gardens are more spacious and numerous; but the scarcity of rain in summer, and the cost of irrigation, make gardens a luxury in Attica. The average Greek has no Rousseauan sensitivity to nature; his mountains are still too troublesome to be beautiful, though his poets, despite its dangers, intone many paeans to the sea. He is not sentimental about nature, so much as animistically imaginative; he peoples the woods and streams of his country with gods and sprites, and thinks of nature as not a landscape but a Valhalla; he names his mountains and rivers from the divinities that inhabit them; and instead of painting nature directly he draws or carves symbolic images of the deities that in his poetic theology give it life. No
t till Alexander’s armies bring back Persian ways and gold will the Greek build himself a pleasure garden or “paradise.” Nevertheless, flowers are loved in Greece as much as anywhere, and gardens and florists supply them all the year round. Flower girls peddle roses, violets, hyacinths, narcissi, irises, myrtles, lilacs, crocuses, and anemones from house to house. Women wear flowers in their hair, dandies wear them behind the ear; and on festal occasions both sexes may come forth with flower garlands, lei-like, around the neck.118

  The interior of the house is simple. Among the poor the floors are of hardened earth; as income rises this basis may be covered with plaster, or paved with flat stones or with small round stones set in cement, as in the Near East immemorially; and all this may be covered with reed mats or rugs. The brick walls are plastered and whitewashed. Heating, which is needed for only three months of the year, is furnished by a brazier whose smoke has to find a way out through the door to the court. Decoration is minimal; but at the end of the fifth century the homes of the rich may have pillared halls, walls paneled with marble or painted imitations of it, mural paintings and tapestries, and ceiling arabesques. Furniture is scanty in the average home—some chairs, some chests, a few tables, a bed. Cushions take the place of upholstery on chairs, but the seats of the rich may be carefully carved, and inlaid with silver, tortoise, or ivory. Chests serve as both closets and chairs. Tables are small, and usually three-legged, whence their name trapezai; they are brought in and removed with the food, and are hardly used for other purposes; writing is done upon the knee. Couches and beds are favorite objects for adornment, being often inlaid or elaborately carved. Leather thongs stretched across the bedstead serve as a spring; there are mattresses and pillows, and embroidered covers, and commonly a raised headrest. Lamps may be hung from the ceiling, or placed upon stands, or take the form of torches elegantly wrought.