y would venture," says the
orator Isaeus, "to dine with a married woman; married women do not go
out to dine with men or permit themselves to eat with strangers." An
Athenian woman who frequented society could not maintain a good
reputation.

The wife, thus secluded and ignorant, was not an agreeable companion.
The husband had taken her not for his life-long companion, but to
keep his house in order, to be the mother of his children, and because
Greek custom and religion required that he should marry. Plato says
that one does not marry because he wants to, but "because the law
constrains him." And the comic poet Menander had found this saying:
"Marriage, to tell the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil." And
so the women in Athens, as in most of the other states of Greece,
always held but little place in society.

FOOTNOTES:

[66] The marble of Pentelicus and the honey of Hymettus.

[67] This legendary king was called Theseus.

[68] Certain limitations, however, are referred to below, under
"Metics."--ED.

[69] Not to mention the Archons, whom they had not ventured to suppress.

[70] Xenophon, "Memorabilia," iii., 7, 6.

CHAPTER XIII

WARS OF THE GREEKS

THE PERSIAN WARS

=Origin of the Persian Wars.=--While the Greeks were completing the
organization of their cities, the Persian king was uniting all the
nations of the East in a single empire. Greeks and Orientals at length
found themselves face to face. It is in Asia Minor that they first
meet.

On the coast of Asia Minor there were rich and populous colonies of
the Greeks;[71] Cyrus, the king of Persia, desired to subject them.
These cities sent for help to the Spartans, who were reputed the
bravest of the Greeks, and this action was reported to Cyrus; he
replied,[72] "I have never feared this sort of people that has in the
midst of the city a place where the people assemble to deceive one
another with false oaths." (He was thinking of the market-place.) The
Greeks of Asia were subdued and made subject to the Great King.

Thirty years later King Darius found himself in the presence of the
Greeks of Europe. But this time it was the Greeks that attacked the
Great King. The Athenians sent twenty galleys to aid the revolting
Ionians; their soldiers entered Lydia, took Sardis by surprise and
burned it. Darius revenged himself by destroying the Greek cities of
Asia, but he did not forget the Greeks of Europe. He had decreed, they
say, that at