d at another
place water. The frightened king sent to Delphi to interrogate the
Oracle upon the meaning of these happenings. The answer was: 'The
oil-tree stands for Minerva, the water for Neptune; it is now with the
citizens after which of the two deities they wish to name their city.'
Kekrops called together the assembly of the people in which men and
women enjoyed the right of suffrage. The men voted for Neptune, the
women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva won.
Thereupon Neptune was angered and he caused the sea to wash over the
territory of the Athenians. In order to soothe the wrath of the god, the
Athenians placed a threefold punishment upon their women:--_they were to
forfeit the suffrage, children were no longer to carry their mother's
name, and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenian
women_."[9]

As in Athens, the transition from the mother to the father-right was
everywhere achieved so soon as a certain height was reached in social
development. Woman is crowded into the house; she is isolated; she is
assigned special quarters--the gynekonitis--, in which she lives; she is
even excluded from intercourse with the male visitors of the house.
That, in fact, was the principal object of her isolation.

This change finds its expression as early as the Odyssey. Telemachus
forbids Penelope's, his mother's, presence among the suitors. He, the
son, orders his mother:

But come now, go to thy bower, and deal with such things as ye can;
With the sock and the loom be busy, and thine handmaids order and
teach,
That they speed the work and the wearing; but for men is the word
and the speech;
For all, but for me the chiefest, for here am I the might and the
power.

Such was the doctrine already common in Greece at that time. It went
even further. Woman, even if a widow, stands so completely under the
rule of the nearest male relative, that she no longer has even the
choice of a husband. The suitors, tired of long waiting, due to the
cunning of Penelope, address themselves to Telemachus through the mouth
of Antinous, saying:

But for thee, do we the suitors this answer to thee show,
That thou in thy soul may'st know it, and that all the folk may know,
_Send thou thy mother away, and bid her a wedding to gain_
_With whomso her father willeth, of whomso her heart may be fain_.

It is at an end with the f