The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first, among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though mothers of large families, and Æschylus speaks of the Amazons as "virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage, and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became the goddess of chastity (Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii, pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W. M. Ramsay, Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, p. 96; Paul Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," Revue des Idées, Dec., 1904).
See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.
De Civitate Dei, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi, cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should, his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.