To the young girl, secluded with her mother, nothing of the liberal arts was taught; it was thought sufficient if she learned to obey.  Xenophon represents a rich and well-educated Athenian speaking thus of his wife with Socrates:  “She was hardly twenty years old when I married her, and up to that time she had been subjected to an exacting surveillance; they had no desire that she should live, and she learned almost nothing.  Was it not enough that one should find in her a woman who could spin the flax to make garments, and who had learned how to distribute duties to the slaves?” When her husband proposed that she become his assistant, she replied with great surprise, “In what can I aid you?  Of what am I capable?  My mother has always taught me that my business was to be prudent.”  Prudence or obedience was the virtue which was required of the Greek woman.

=Marriage.=—­At the age of fifteen the girl married.  The parents had chosen the husband; it might be a man from a neighboring family, or a man who had been a long-time friend of the father, but always a citizen of Athens.  It was rare that the young girl knew him; she was never consulted in the case.  Herodotus, speaking of a Greek, adds:  “This Callias deserves mention for his conduct toward his daughters; for when they were of marriageable age he gave them a rich dowry, permitted them to choose husbands from all the people, and he then married them to the men of their choice.”

=Athenian Women.=—­In the inner recess of the Athenian house there was a retired apartment reserved for the women—­the Gynecaeum.  Husband and relatives were the only visitors; the mistress of the household remained here all day with her slaves; she directed them, superintended the house-keeping, and distributed to them the flax for them to spin.  She herself was engaged with weaving garments.  She left the house seldom save for the religious festivals.  She never appeared in the society of men:  “No one certainly 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.