No easy province: Make not me your judge,
Great though my power, it is not mine to act,
I told thee so, without my people’s voice
Assenting.
It is plain that these lines refer to a time when woman was not “a thrall to man.” It relates also to a time when the basileus or chief could not act without the consent of his people.
That in the earliest traditions and accounts of the Greeks, women occupy a much more exalted position than they do four or five centuries later, is a fact which can be explained only by the truths which have been set forth in the foregoing pages; namely, the capture of women for wives, at first singly and finally in groups. We have seen that during the period designated as the Latter Status of barbarism, wars were frequently undertaken upon no other pretext than that of securing women for wives. Cities were attacked and destroyed, the men murdered, and the women carried away captives. Property both landed and personal was seized and held by the conquerors, and as these captured women were strangers, aliens, and dependents in the countries to which they were taken, they became simply sexual slaves, or wives, and in process of time sank to the position in which we find them under Solon, the lawgiver of Athens.
The difference in the sentiments entertained toward women during Homer’s time and those which had come to prevail among the Greeks in the sixth century, B.C., may be observed in the following lines from Æschylus, and also in a quotation from The Iliad, which follows. At the siege of Thebes, when the women, fearing captivity more than death, appeared before the sacred images to pray for protection, Etiocles the chief, trembling with fear, and himself praying loudly to Jove, to Earth, and “all the guardian gods,” being displeased with the attitude of the female supplicants, and doubtless eager to exercise his authority over women thus displays his contempt for them:
It is not to be borne, ye wayward race;
Is this your best, is this the aid you lend
The State, the fortitude with which you steel