ed guests, debauching her maidservants, and
consuming her provisions by wholesale. But her own son's attitude is
hardly less disrespectful and insulting than that of the ungallant,
impertinent suitors. He repeatedly tells his mother to mind her own
business--the loom and the distaff--leaving words for men; and each
time the poet recommends this rude, unfilial speech as a "wise saying"
which the queen humbly "lays to heart." His love of property far
exceeds his love of his mother, for as soon as he is grown up he begs
her to go home and get married again, "so troubled is he for the
substance which the suitors waste." He urges her at last to "marry
whom she will," offering as an extra inducement "countless gifts" if
she will only go.

To us it seems topsy-turvy that a mother should have to ask her son's
consent to marry again, but to the Greeks that was a matter of course.
There are many references to this custom in the Homeric poems. Girls,
too, though they be princesses, are disposed of without the least
regard to their wishes, as when Agamemnon offers Achilles the choice
of one of his three daughters (IX., 145). Big sums are sometimes paid
for a girl--by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in battle, "far from
his bride, of whom he had known no joy, and much had he given for her;
first a hundred kine he gave, and thereafter promised a thousand,
goats and sheep together." The idea, too, occurs over and over again
that among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offer
should take the bride. How much this mercenary, unceremonious, and
often cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among these
Greeks is indicated by Homer's naive epithet for brides, [Greek:
parthenoi alphesiboiai], "virgins who bring in oxen." And this is the
state of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying "there is a certain
authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom"!

The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of their wars,
as among the Australian savages, was usually woman, as Achilles
frankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve cities
and passed through many bloody days of battle, "_warring with folk for
their women's sake_." (_Iliad,_ IX., 327.) Nestor admonishes the
Greeks to "let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain by
some Trojan's wife" (354-55). The leader of the Greek forces issues
this command regarding the Trojans:

"Of them let not one escape sheer