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The doctrine that a wife is her husband's property is applied to the fullest extent, and any offence against that property is punished with the utmost rigour of the law. A husband who finds another man in his harem is allowed to put him to death. At Athens there is no pretence of 'the sanctity of marriage': the offence and the punishment is the same whether the intrigue is with the master's wife or with his concubine: each is equally the master's property, to be protected at any cost. It is a more heinous crime to make love to a woman who belongs to another man than to offer her violence; for the offence is viewed solely from the owner's side, and a woman who willingly yields to another is outraging her lawful master's amour propre more deeply than if she were taken by force. The lover is put to death; the ravisher pays a fine: the point of view being much the same as used to hold in English law, where the wife-beater was regarded as a less offensive character than the poacher.
But if the husband of an erring wife had the support of the law, however violent his methods of revenge, the case was very different when the woman was the offended party. There is an anecdote in Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades which reveals the attitude of the Athenian lawgivers.
Hipparete made a prudent and affectionate wife;---but at last growing very uneasy at her husband's associating with such a number of courtesans, both strangers and Athenians, she quitted his house and went to her brother's. Alcibiades went on with his debaucheries, and gave himself no pain about his wife; but it was necessary for her, in order to obtain a legal separation, to give in a bill of divorce to the archon, and to appear personally with it; for the sending of it by another hand would not do. When she came to do this according to law, Alcibiades rushed in, caught her in his arms, and carried her through the market-place to his own house, no one presuming to oppose him, or to take her from him. From that time she remained with him until her death, which happened not long after, when Alcibiades was upon his voyage to Ephesus. Nor does the violence used in this case seem to be contrary to the laws either of society in general or of that republic in particular. For the law of Athens, in requiring her who wants to be divorced to appear publicly in person, probably intended to give the husband an opportunity to meet with her and to recover her.---Plutarch, 'Alcibiades,' Langhorne's Translation.
A wife seeking to escape from an unworthy husband, we see, is regarded in the same light as a slave seeking to escape from his owner, and all the resources[186] of the law are put at the disposal of the husband and the master. There was a constant tendency to think of women and slaves together; and the institution of slavery was certainly one of the most powerful agents in the degradation of women at Athens. A slave-girl was, in the eye of the law, a thing---not a human being, and she was free from all restraints of moral sanction. She was the property of her owner, and her only duty was to obey him in all things: virtue, chastity, modesty, were for her things impossible of attainment; and over the whole business was cast the protection and encouragement of the law. There came into existence a class of women condemned to physical and moral degradation---a class whose very existence was an insult to womankind; so that Aristophanes, at least, has the wit to see that the establishment of a female government would have as one of its first results the forcible abolition of all such recognised and legal forms of vice.
Women and slaves then were linked together; and it must be remembered, as Professor Murray says, that people do not become slaves by a legal process; they become slaves when they are brought into contact with superiors who have the power and the will to use them as tools. There are three principal tests of slavery, ancient or modern, and in ancient life they will often apply equally well to women.[187] Firstly, slaves are a degraded and immoral class. This was continually insisted upon; and doubtless one result was to produce, in a certain degree, the vices falsely imputed to nature.
Secondly, their work is despised, as unworthy of free men. The harder work was left in the hands of slaves or women, who did not receive any pay, and the super-abundant leisure of the male citizen was devoted to the political life.
Thirdly, the condition of dependence, once fully established, soon produces a feeling of despair. The willingness to die, which is so noticeable in Euripides' heroines, is one of the sure signs of slavery. Slaves are lacking in spirit; some, indeed, are so completely lacking that they are happy in servitude: the impetus to revolt must come from without, especially when the servile state has existed for many centuries.
Slavery may be defined as the economic exploitation of the weaker; and, though it does not exist in our time and land, it offers such a convenient basis for civilisation that various devices are used even now to take its place. There is the theory, for example, that some kinds of work are higher than others, and therefore should be paid on a higher scale. Or again, that the same work, if performed by different persons, requires different remuneration.
Many estimates of women's inferiority have ultimately an economic basis. The more lucrative[188] trades and professions are those for which it is considered that women are temperamentally unfit.
It is a noticeable fact that all these general conceptions of women's weakness have always been closely connected with their legal status. In Athens, where women could not hold property, and an heiress was taken over by the nearest male relative as a necessary encumbrance on the estate, the estimate of woman's character was very low. In Alexandria and at Rome, where women by various devices outwitted the law and became possessed of some degree of economic independence, their moral position also changed for the better. In England feminism begins with the Married Women's Property Act.
But as long as slavery, social or economic, is not recognised by the law, it cannot be the curse that it was to ancient life. In Athens it was a legal institution, owing its validity to much the same mode of thought as made the wife also her husband's chattel. It is the business of lawyers to defend the law, and, if the law is bad, their moral sense is necessarily warped in the process; so that it is not surprising if the private speeches of the Attic orators, although they exhibit the natural subtlety of the Athenians in a striking light, by no means give an equally strong impression of moral rectitude. All the orators are the same in this respect. Demosthenes[189] in matters of State was a high-minded patriot; as a lawyer he is, like the rest of his colleagues, a professional liar, and does not scruple to falsify and misrepresent the truth. Lysias so forgets the man in the advocate that he seems to reserve his highest powers for his worst cases, and obviously delights in such a client as the shameless old cripple for whom he writes his most ingenious speech. Isus has no regard for veracity, and it has been found by painful experience that his unsupported statements, even on simple questions of fact, are, to put it mildly, extremely unreliable. As for Hyperides, he is careless of shame so long as he wins his case; and his gesture, as he bids his fair client display her charms, is like the calculated boldness of the slave-dealer offering his girls to the highest bidder.
