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(The jury are meant to draw the inference that women should never leave the house: one appearance in public may mean ruin.)
He watched my wife's maid who goes to do the marketing, made a proposal to her, and soon effected his purpose of seduction. I must tell you, gentlemen, that my humble home is built in two storeys, the upper part similar in style to the ground floor, one containing the women's apartments, the other the men's rooms. Now when our baby was born, the mother began by nursing it herself, and to avoid any risk of her coming down stairs at bath-time, I took up my quarters in the upper rooms, and the women came down to the ground floor. Moreover, we soon got into the way of my wife leaving me to go and sleep with the baby downstairs, so that she might give him the breast and prevent him crying.
(It is, of course, essential that the master's rest at night should not be disturbed, and the jury will agree that this was a legitimate reason for a wife's absence from her proper place.)
This went on for a long time and I never suspected anything. Such an arrant simpleton was I that I thought my wife the most virtuous woman in Athens. Well, gentlemen, time passed away, and one day I came back home unexpectedly from the country.[196] After dinner the baby began to cry and make itself unpleasant: the maid was hurting it on purpose to cause a disturbance, as I heard afterwards, for the fellow was in the house. I told my wife to go and give it the breast to stop it crying, but at first she would not go: she pretended that she was so delighted to see me after my long absence. Finally, when I began to get angry and bade her be off, 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'you want to stay here and make love to the parlourmaid; I caught you pulling her about the other day when you were drunk.' At that I smiled, and she got up and went away, pulling the door to in pretended jest, and taking away the key. I did not think anything of it, nor had I any suspicions: indeed, I soon fell asleep, for I had just come from the country and was glad to get rest. It was getting on for daybreak when she returned and opened the door. I asked her then why the doors had been banging in the night, and she pretended that the child's lamp had blown out, and she had gone next door to get a light. I said nothing and believed her tale. I did, however, notice that her face was covered with powder---although her brother had not been dead a month---but still I said nothing about her conduct. I went out and left the house in silence.
(White cheeks were highly esteemed at Athens, and when a lady wished to be especially attractive, she procured them artificially. In this case the husband is distracted by a double feeling: gratification at his wife's apparent desire to please him, and disgust at her obvious disrespect for a male relative.)
Some time elapsed after these events, gentlemen, and I had no inkling of my misfortune, when one day an[197] old person came up to me. She was sent, as I heard afterwards, by another woman that fellow had seduced and then abandoned, who, in her rage and indignation had spied on him until she found out the reason of his desertion. Well, the old lady came to me near my house, where she was watching, and 'Euphiletus,' said she, 'don't think that I have come in any spirit of officious interference: the man who is wronging you and your wife, as it happens, is an enemy of mine. If you take the maid who goes to market and does your errands, and torture her, you will find out everything. The man is Eratosthenes, of Oea: he is responsible for this; he has seduced your wife and many other women besides: that is his trade.
So the warning comes, and then events move quickly. The husband takes the servant, and by a mixture of promises and threats compels her not only to confess, but to betray her mistress. When next the lover comes to the house---it is alleged by the prosecution that he is beguiled there by the husband, and although this is denied, it is regarded as a quite legitimate plot---the maid informs her master; witnesses are hastily summoned; the door, left unfastened by the girl, is pushed open and the guilty pair are discovered together. Eratosthenes is struck down, his arms are pinioned, and then in the name of the law and in cold blood he is killed. The scene is like the last act of Scheherazade without its barbaric magnificence. Of the woman nothing is said, and the speaker concludes by reminding his[198] judges that his cause is theirs, and that the only way to prevent illicit love is to take summary vengeance on the lover.
The point of view, it will be noticed, as regards the marriage relationship, is very different from that expressed by Plato or Aristotle. Plato regards marriage as a temporary connection dictated by mutual interest and dissolvable at will. Aristotle says (Politics, 7, 16):
As to adultery, let it be held disgraceful for any man or woman to be unfaithful when they are man and wife. If during the time of bearing children anything of the sort occur, let the guilty person be punished with a loss of privileges in proportion to the offence.
The philosophers see that marital fidelity is important chiefly in relation to children and the State, and they attach the same stigma to either of the parties who break the contract. Lysias, as a lawyer, suiting his arguments to a male audience, takes much lower ground. The husband smiles at his own infidelities, but claims the right to commit murder when his wife retaliates.
The Eratosthenes is, perhaps, the most vivid picture we have of home-life in Athens, but the general impression given by all the orators is much the same. Women are either cowed into hopeless submission or else they are shamelessly profligate. The occasional exceptions, such as we find in Lysias'[199] speech 'Against Diogiton,' where a widow defends her children's interests with skill and vigour, show that the fault was due to the marriage system rather than to woman's nature. Most of the women, however, are incapable of energy: their prison life has deprived them of the power and will to act. In Lysias' speech 'Against Simon,' for example, the speaker, a bachelor living in an abominable relationship, has his sister and nieces as inmates of his house, and he says: 'These ladies' life has been so decent and orderly that they are ashamed even for the men of their own household to set eyes upon them.' In Demosthenes' speech 'Against Conon,' his unfortunate client, again a bachelor, has his mother keeping house for him. When, after his encounter with the 'Fighting Cocks' Club' he is carried home, his cloak stolen, his lip split, and both eyes closed, the ladies of his establishment, his mother and his female attendants, begin to weep and wail over his sad condition---but they do nothing else. His male acquaintances carry him off to the public bath, there fetch a doctor, and finally remove him to the house of a friend. Even as ministering angels the Athenian women seem to have been ineffective. Only in the case of the imprisonment or the death of their male relatives do they come actively forward, and the business of mourning and funeral lamentation was by convention left almost entirely in their hands.
Most of the Athenian women then, as we see them in the writings of the orators, are mere passive animals; a few, and by no means the least successful, are open in their profligacy. Such an one is the mother of schines, as we have her described by Demosthenes in the speech 'On the Crown'; such also the abominable pair, mother and daughter, who are the chief characters in the speech 'Against Nera,' which is attributed to Demosthenes. Here the mother, Nera, a woman of notoriously bad character, succeeds in marrying an Athenian citizen, and her daughter Phan, a person as vicious as herself, by one of those strange turns of fortune only possible in a real democracy, becomes the wife of the King-Archon, the head of the State religion, as we might say, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Such another, finally, is the fair Antigona in Hyperides' speech 'Against Athenogenas,' a lady who combined the professions of broker and courtesan, and was equally successful in both.
