for thee." In the Eumenides Apollo asserts that woman does not beget; she is only nurse; the mother only cherishes the germ. He uses Pallas as a proof that one could be born without a mother, but not without a father. In Sophocles's Trachinian Maidens Deianeira, the heroine, "the most real woman's soul that the Athenian dramatists ever put upon the stage,"[1] says that love is invincible; she feels it herself, and so it would be madness for her to blame her husband and his new love, if they too have fallen under it — "No shame to them and it does not harm me." Antigone says: "We must remember that we are only women and cannot strive with men. We are under authority."
In the Periclean age Athens bad become a great city, and it was hard for women to move about in it freely, for they were in need of escort and protection. Hence they became secluded, especially in the higher classes; in the country they had more important functions, contributed more, and therefore were more free.[2] Thucydides[3] attributes to Pericles the saying that women are best when men never mention them, either to praise or blame. Pericles himself, in his relation to Aspasia, "lightly broke the barriers of the conventional morals of the time"; "according to the spirit of that age, the natural right of love must prevail over the right of marriage which human ordinances had created. Deliverance from every constraint was the effort of that age, and it was most nearly realized at Athens."[4] The current view was that marriage was a necessary evil, a business arrangement, part of the arrangement of an establishment, an arrangement as unsentimental as a contract to buy or hire a house. Property interests might make a marriage
