A History of the Wife (5 page)

And Christians could look to the supreme model of the Virgin Mary for virtues that were touted above all others: obedience and chastity. Although the marriage of Mary to Joseph was merely an artifact of her mission to produce the son of God, she was held up as the image of ideal wifehood. Christian women, for centuries to come, would sense the tension between Mary’s miraculous purity and their own carnality.

WIVES IN ANCIENT GREECE

We know a great deal about wives in ancient Greece, and we know very little. All the great Greek literature, with the exception of Sappho’s poetry, was authored by men and reflects a male view of women. The voices of the wives—and there are many in Greek literature—have emerged from the mouths of men. It’s as if we could only know the lives of twentieth-century American women from the writings of Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Philip Roth. What we learn from Greek texts concerning the social and legal condition of married women tells us virtually nothing about
their
hopes, fears, and disap- pointments.

What did a Greek wife feel toward the goddess Hera, patron of mar- riage, protector of women, and sister-wife of Zeus? Did she pray to Hera as Christian women would later pray to the Virgin Mary? Dignified images of Hera adorned Greek shrines and temples, but oral and writ- ten tales depicted her as a fiercely jealous wife, given to plots against the other women Zeus favored and his illegitimate offspring. The dis- parity between these two images—the rancorous wife and the sacred matron—suggests that Greek wives may have felt both awe and empa- thy for Hera, as they called upon her for protection against their own husbands, whose license with other females was always a potential source of discord.

During the Homeric era (eighth century
B
.
C
.
E
.), the ideal wife was Penelope in
The Odyssey
—a mature, clever, and faithful woman. While

Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War, wandered for nineteen years, Penelope managed their kingdom in Ithaca, raised their son Telemachus, and warded off the many suitors who vied to replace her husband. She procrastinated by saying she would make her choice only after she had completed weaving her father-in-law’s shroud, which she did by day and then unraveled at night. By the time this strategy was discovered, Odysseus was already on his way home and arrived in time to recover his wife.

The scene of their reunion is surely one of the best loved in all liter- ature. Penelope, having given up hope of ever seeing Odysseus alive, was reluctant to accept a disguised beggar as her husband. In receiving him coldly and putting him to an identity test, she proved to be as crafty as her proverbially wily husband. The test Penelope had devised centered around the marriage bed. When she instructed the old nurse to move the bed outside the bedroom, Odysseus flared up with exas- peration and reminded Penelope that their marital bed—the one he had crafted as a young man—could not be moved, for its bedpost was made from an olive tree around which he had constructed their entire bedroom.

With this proof, Penelope “ran up to Odysseus, threw her arms round his neck and kissed his head.... Penelope’s surrender melted Odysseus’ heart, and he wept as he held his dear wife in his arms, so loyal and so true.”
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Loyal and true, prudent and faithful, these are the words that describe Penelope, the ideal wife. His was the wider world of war and wandering, adventure in distant lands and foreign beds, while she waited and wove and remained loyal to her spouse.

At the moment of their reunion, they do not forget that other woman—Helen—the source of all their woes. Helen of Argive, better known as Helen of Troy, was the antithesis of the faithful Penelope. The wife of Menelaus, she allowed herself to be carried off to Troy by Paris, thus causing the Trojan War. Helen the beautiful, Helen the frivolous, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships” in the stirring words of Christopher Marlowe, was the most famous femme fatale of antiquity, one of those dangerous women men fear for their voluptuous beauty. In the Greco-Roman world, Helen and Penelope represented the bad and the good wife, an opposition that Christians would later attribute to Eve and the Virgin Mary.

Yet it is hardly for their stereotypical qualities that Penelope and

Odysseus have enchanted readers for generations. Even if she repre- sents the home-bound wife and he the wandering hero in accordance with the sex roles meted out to the two genders, what rings especially true for modern readers is their playful gamesmanship and deep inti- macy, their sense of a shared history unattenuated by their long separa- tion, their reunion in bed with the pleasures of lovemaking and “the fresh delights of talk.” This pillow talk (did the Greeks have pillows?) is the special province of spouses in all ages. “He heard his noble wife tell of all she had put up with in his home.... And in his turn, royal Odys- seus told her of all the discomfiture he had inflicted on his foes.” Which couple has not delighted in this kind of verbal interchange before or after lovemaking? Such a scene of harmonious domestic intimacy is indeed rare in the pages of antique literature. It provides literary evi- dence for the belief, current among many classicists, that marriage at the time of Homer was more egalitarian than it would become three centuries later in Athens, and that Homeric women enjoyed a respect and freedom unknown to Greek women of the classical period.
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When we turn from the Homeric period to the classical age in fifth- century Athens, the source of information about wives is considerably larger, if still confined to male-authored documents. The great tragedi- ans of this later period—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides— confront us with terrible domestic violence inflicted by willful husbands and wives. Oedipus and Jocasta, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Jason and Medea are destined to destroy one another. Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War (with the help of her lover) on the grounds that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia when he set out for Troy. Medea kills the two chil- dren she had with Jason as revenge upon him for renouncing her in favor of a new wife. And what of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, Laius, and married his mother, Jocasta, only to discover the truth years later—a discovery that caused Oedipus to blind himself and Jocasta to commit suicide. These stories reveal a deep-seated fear of vengeful wives, such as Clytemnestra and Medea, and the pollution that could issue, however unwittingly, from an incestuous widow like Jocasta. A good Greek widow would not have remarried in the first place. The dark truths embodied in these dramas suggest the smolder- ing tensions that existed, and continue to exist, between many spouses. Wives do indeed nurture murderous thoughts towards the husbands

who replace them with other women or harm their children, though they rarely act out their revenge in such spectacular fashion.

Greek comedy, on the other hand, probably came closer to the daily reality of conjugal life, even when grossly exaggerated. In
Lysistrata,
first presented in 411
B
.
C
.
E
., Aristophanes seized upon the timeless idea of a wife refusing her husband sex and expanded it into an outlandish political comedy. When Lysistrata and her sister conspirators decide to oppose the warlike ways of men by simply denying them sexual satis- faction, Greek society comes to a standstill. At least in this instance, the power of the bed proved stronger than the power of the sword. With its ribald props and comments, the play seems as fresh today as the sixties slogan “Make Love, Not War.”

Daily life in classical Athens was ordered according to a set of pre- scribed conventions for adults of both genders. Marriage seems to have been largely a matter of property arrangements—financial deals, with little regard for the sentiments of the bride and groom. A family with a marriageable son would look for a daughter-in-law with a sufficient dowry that could be used to support the young couple. While this was especially true of upper- and middle-class families, even lower-class unions, those of shopkeepers and fishermen, were concerned with property of one kind or another.

Another concern was citizenship. In fifth-century Athens, citizen- ship was hereditary, but only if both parents were Athenians and of the citizen class. As of 451–450
B
.
C
.
E
. under laws instituted by Pericles, male citizens had to marry females whose parents had been citizens, if they wanted their children to have the same coveted status.
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While such facts concerning the “public” nature of marriage are not difficult to find, it is much more difficult to find out anything about pri- vate sentiments. What did a young girl of fourteen of fifteen—the tradi- tional age for marriage in classical Greece—feel when informed that her marriage was imminent? The prospective groom would have discussed the matter with her father, but the girl herself was probably never con- sulted, and probably had little, if any, contact with her future husband. There is reason to believe that marriage was often “a traumatic affair for the bride.”
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At a still tender age, she was obliged to leave her own
oikos
(household) and enter into the
oikos
of her husband, where her treat- ment would depend upon the kindness, or ill will, of her husband and

his mother. A classic Greek lament recognizing the pain of separation puts these words into the mouth of the bride leaving her family of ori- gin:

Everyone is driving me away. everyone is telling me to leave.

. . . .

I am leaving with tears and with a heavy heart.
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The marriage betrothal (the
eggue,
or “promise”) would have taken place long before the marriage ceremony. It was essentially an oral contract, made between the man who gave the woman in marriage— usually her father—and the bridegroom. The father would say “I pledge [woman’s name] for the purpose of producing legitimate chil- dren.” The groom replied: “I accept.” The bride was not present. Betrothal was, in and of itself, a binding commitment with both legal and financial penalties if the marriage was not concluded. This is a far cry from the lack of ceremony today when lovers move in with one another without asking their parents, and with little fear of reprisal if they separate.

Marriage for a Greek man and for a Greek woman was the defining fact of their lives. For both of them, it was a rite of passage marking the transition from childhood into adulthood. The marriage ceremony was usually celebrated in winter and lasted for two or three days. On the first day, the father of the bride made offerings to the gods of marriage, Zeus and Hera. The bride sacrificed her toys to Artemis, who was the goddess of chastity and childbirth as well as nature and the hunt. On the second day, there was a wedding feast at the bride’s home. The bride, wearing a veil, was then transported in a cart or carriage by her husband and his best friend to her husband’s home, where she would live. A crowd of people preceded them singing the wedding chant (called the
Hymen
) and lighting the way with candles or torches.

The wedding procession was a very old custom, as can be inferred from the description of such a scene on the shield of Achilles in
The Iliad
.

. . . under glowing torches they brought forth the brides

from the women’s chambers, marching through the streets while choir on choir the wedding song rose high

and the young men came dancing, whirling round in rings

and among them the flutes and harps kept up their stirring call— women rushed to the doors and each stood moved with wonder.

Like the women spectators along the route, we get to glimpse some of the festivities lavished on a wedding.
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Once the bride had been ushered into her new home, the attendants stood outside and sang the epithalamium, or song for the wedding chamber. The newlyweds enclosed in the bridal chamber were expected to consummate their union, an act by which the husband took full possession of his wife. From this point on, the bride’s husband would replace her father as her
kyrios
(guardian and master). Aristotle (384–322
B
.
C
.
E
.) distinguished between the “statesman-like” rule of the husband over his wife and the “royal” rule of a father over his child, but whatever the gradations of difference in authority, he upheld the con- ventional view that “the male is more fitted to rule than the female” (
Politics
I:12).

Despite the conventions, laws, and ceremonies that propped up ancient Greek marriage, it was by no means an irreversible affair. In Athenian society, a wife did not enter definitively into her husband’s family until she had given him a child. Until that moment, her father could terminate the marriage at any time, usually for reasons that had to do with family property; then the father would become, once again, his daughter’s
kyrios
. Moreover, a husband could repudiate a wife at will, without justification, but only if he were willing to give back the dowry.

Although heterosexual marriage was the only legally recognized form of couplehood in classical Greece, husbands were by no means limited to sexual relations with their wives. They could find supple- mental sex beyond the marriage bed with concubines, male and female slaves, male and female prostitutes, and male and female lovers. The only officially forbidden fruit was the wife of another citizen. The orator Apollodorus is often quoted as saying that the Athenian man could have three women: his wife for producing heirs and watching over his property, his concubine for daily attention to his body (mean- ing sexual relations), and
hetaeras
(courtesans) for pleasure.
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Wives, on the other hand, were segregated from men other than their husbands, and severely punished if caught with a lover. At the least, a woman’s husband would divorce her and send her back to her family of origin. In one notorious instance, an incensed Athenian hus- band named Euphiletos killed his wife’s lover, Eratosthenes, and then won his case in court as justifiable homicide. Having caught the adul- terous pair sleeping together, Euphiletos had thrown his wife’s naked lover to the ground, tied his hands, refused his offer of a compensatory sum of money, and killed him on the spot. When brought to trial for murder, the husband successfully defended himself with a speech pre- pared by a well-known man of letters, Lysias, who subsequently recorded the incident for posterity. Apparently the tribunal was con- vinced that Euphiletos had acted not only in his own self-interest, but also in the interest of the Athenian city-state, since adultery, were it to go unpunished, could undermine the whole social order. Such was the rationale for a husband’s murderous revenge in 400
B
.
C
.
E
.
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