The women attend the heroes in the bath, a custom which to us seems inconsistent with the other sex mores but it illustrates well the power of the mores to extend approval, for the sake of an interest, to an incongruous usage. The gods give wives, so that marriages are made in heaven; they bless the marriage of a man who pleases them,[1] and they give children.[2] "Nothing is stronger and nobler than when man and wife, united in harmony of mind, rule their house in wisdom."[3] Achilles says: "Every brave and sensible man loves his consort."[4] Cases occur in which a man renounces a slave woman out of respect to his wife,[5] but there are others in which he declares that he prefers the slave woman.[6] The case of Penelope was complicated: it was not sure that her husband was dead; her son was a boy, but he grew to manhood and became her guardian as she had been his. She was clever and wise and managed well a difficult situation the phases of which changed as time went on, but always presented new difficulties. Telemachus declared to her with rude plainness that he was master[7]; he told her to go to the women's quarters and attend to the housework and to leave deliberation to men. Thus he defined her "sphere." Hesiod, as quoted in the Anthology of Stobæus,[8] says: "If a man has had the luck to get a wife who suits him, that is the acme of good fortune; if he has a bad one it is the worst disaster." Menander is also quoted: "If we rightly judge the matter, marriage is indeed an evil, but necessity imposes this evil on us."
Augustine[9] has preserved from Varro a myth of early
- ↑ Od., XV, 26; IV, 208.
- ↑ Ibid., IV, 12; XVI. 117.
- ↑ Ibid., VI, 182-184; Il., VI 407.
- ↑ Il., IX, 341-342; Friedreich, J. B.: Die Realien in der Iliade und Odyssee, 197-200; especially 128 on the sex mores.
- ↑ Od., I, 431; Il., IX, 133; XIX, 261.
- ↑ Il., I, 118.
- ↑ Od., I, 356.
- ↑ 69.
- ↑ De Civitate Dei. XVIII, 9.
