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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



pressed by the irresistible power of the gods and 

 of fate, and the weakness of mortals ; they thus 

 found an easy excuse for any aberrations of men, 

 but especially of helpless women ; and their 

 6trong sense of the shortness of life and the 

 dreariness of death led them to try to make the 

 best of their allotted span. Then their ideas 

 of love and marriage tended to foster gentle- 

 ness. In the Homeric poems there is no love- 

 making ; the idea of flirtation is absolutely and 

 entirely unknown. They no doubt spoke sweet 

 words to each other, but they kept what they 

 said to themselves. And a man who wished to 

 marry a girl proved the reality of his desire gen- 

 erally by offering the father a handsome gift for 

 her, but sometimes by undertaking a heavy task, 

 or engaging in a dangerous contest. And when 

 she left her father's home, she bent all her ways 

 to please the man who had sought after her, and 

 she succeeded. In the Homeric poems the man 

 loves the woman, and the woman soon comes to 

 love her husband, if she has not done so before 

 marriage. The Homeric Greeks are, even at this 

 early stage, out-and out monogamists. 1 Monog- 

 amy is in the very heart of the Greek heroes. No 

 one of them wishes more than one woman. There 

 is a curious instance of the power of heroic affec- 

 tion in Achilles. A captive widow has become 

 his partner before the walls of Troy. She is 

 very fond of him, and he becomes very fond of 

 her. But there is no proper marriage between 

 them, and Achilles could not worthily celebrate 

 his marriage in a camp far from his friends and 

 home. Yet such is his love for her, and her 

 alone, that she is to him a real wife. 2 And, 

 when Patroklos dies, Briseis, in her lament over 

 him, states that he promised that he would make 

 her the wedded wife of Achilles, and take her to 

 Phthia, the native land of the hero, and celebrate 

 the marriage-feast among the Myrmidons. 3 Prob- 

 ably Achilles had often given her the same prom- 

 ise, though he knew that his father might assign 

 him a wife, and there might thus be difficulties 

 in the way, and Patroklos had offered to help him 

 in carrying out his design. If there was such 

 true love to a captive, we may expect this still 

 more to be the case with wives of the same race 

 and rank. And so it is. Beautiful, indeed, is 

 the picture of married life which Homer draws. 



1 The later Greeks attributed to Cecrops, or some 

 other Attic hero, the introduction of monogamy. The 

 state of women in Greece before the time ofllomer is 

 discussed in Bachofen's " Mutterrecht," and in Mr. 

 McLennan's " Kinship in Ancient Greece." 



2 I]., ix., 336. 

 „ 3 II., xix., 297. 



" There is nothing," he says, 1 " better and nobler 

 than when husband and wife, being of one mind, 

 rule a household." And such households he 

 portrays in the balls of Alcinous and Arete, and 

 in the Trojan home of Hector and Andromache, 

 but still more marked and beautiful is the con- 

 stant love of Penelope and Ulysses. Indeed, Ho- 

 mer always represents the married relation as 

 happy and harmonious. In the households of 

 earth there is peace. It is in the halls of Olym- 

 pus that we find wife quarreling with husband. 

 But the love of these women to their husbands is 

 the love of mortals to mortals. They do not 

 swear eternal devotion to each other. They have 

 no dream of loving only one, and that one for- 

 ever, in this life and the next. They do not look 

 much beyond the present ; and therefore, if a 

 husband or a wife were to die, it would be in- 

 cumbent on the survivor to look out for a suc- 

 cessor. Even when a husband is long absent from 

 his wife, it is not expected that he can endure the 

 troubles of life without the company and comfort 

 of one woman's society. Thus Agamemnon 

 takes to himself the captive Chryseis, and comes 

 to love her better than his wife. Thus Achilles 

 becomes so attached to Briseis as to weep bit- 

 terly when she is taken from him ; but when she 

 is taken from him, he consoles himself with the 

 beautiful-cheeked Dioraede. And Ulysses, though 

 he loves his Penelope best, and longs for her, 

 does not refuse the embraces of the goddesses 

 with whom he is compelled to stay in the course 

 of his wanderings. Homer's insight into human 

 nature is apparent in the circumstance that it is 

 only in the heart of a true woman that he places 

 resistance to the ordinary modes of thought. 

 The peculiarity of Penelope's affection is that it 

 will not submit to prevalent ideas ; she loves and 

 admires her Ulysses, and she will love no other. 

 Contrary to all custom, she puts off the suitors 

 year after year. The time has arrived when 

 every one expects her to marry again. She has 

 seen her sou Telemachus grow to manhood. She 

 has now no excuse. But still she refuses, wait- 

 ing against hope for the return of him who in her 

 heart she believes will return no more. 2 



After what I have stated I need scarcely say 

 that the influence of woman was very great in 

 the Homeric period. The two poems turn upon 

 affection fot women. The Trojan War had its 



1 Od., vi., 182. 



8 Lasaulx ("Zur Geschichte und Philosophic der 

 Ehe bci deu Griechen," p. 30) adduces Laodamia as an 

 instance of the tame constancy; but the case is not 

 so clear. 



