But it is in their treatment of women—­which Gladstone commends so highly—­that the barbarous nature of the Greek “heroes” is revealed in all its hideous nakedness.  The king of their gods set them the example when he punished his wife and queen by hanging her up amid the clouds with two anvils suspended from her feet; clutching and throwing to the earth any gods that came to her rescue. (Iliad, XV., 15-24.) Rank does not exempt the women of the heroic age from slavish toil.  Nausicaea, though a princess, does the work of a washerwoman and drives her own chariot to the laundry on the banks of the river, her only advantage over her maids being that they have to walk.[296] Her mother, too, queen of the Phoeaceans, spends her time sitting among the waiting maids spinning yarn, while her husband sits idle and “sips his wine like an immortal.”  The women have to do all the work to make the men comfortable, even washing their feet, giving them their bath, anointing them, and putting their clothes on them again (Odyssey, XIX., 317; VIII., 454; XVII., 88, etc.),[297] even a princess like Polycaste, daughter of the divine Nestor, being called upon to perform such menial service (III., 464-67).  As for the serving-maids, they grind corn, fetch water, and do other work, just like red squaws; and in the house of Odysseus we read of a poor girl, who, while the others were sleeping, was still toiling at her corn because her weakness had prevented her from finishing her task (XX., 110).

Penelope was a queen, but was very far from being treated like one.  Gladstone found “the strongest evidence of the respect in which women were held” in the fact that the suitors stopped short of violence to her person!  They did everything but that, making themselves at home in her house, unbidden and hated 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