A fourth is the general outline of the woman’s character, as it is to be estimated from the varied specimens which Homer has set before us.
Law and custom of marriage.
Firstly; a main criterion of the general condition of woman in a given state of society is to be found in the view which it may exhibit of the great institution of marriage. In proportion as that institution is purified and elevated by just restraint, the condition of woman is honourable, free, and happy. In proportion as it is relaxed, in accommodation to human infirmity or appetite, the condition of woman is degraded and servile; for where desire is the law, strength is its appropriate and only sanction, and the cause of the weaker fails. Just as a strict and efficient police is most important to the unprotected, so a strict law of marriage is most for the interest of the woman.
The general position of womankind in the Homeric age is high on both sides of the Archipelago; but, as respects marriage, its chiefest pillar, it is perceptibly even higher among the Greeks than among the Trojans. Among the multitude of cases, that either directly or incidentally come before us in the poems, there is nothing that at all resembles the Asiatic household of Priam, or that seems to favour polygamy. Nor have we any instance where a wife is divorced or taken away from her husband, and then made the wife of another man during his lifetime. The froward Suitors, who urge Penelope to choose a new husband from among them, do it upon the plea that Ulysses must be dead, and that there is no hope of his return: a plea not irrational, if we presume that the real term of his absence came to even half the number of years which Homer has assigned to it. The ancient law of England, while it repudiated the principle of divorce, recognised the presumption of the husband’s death, when brought near to certainty by a long term of absence, as equivalent to death itself for the purpose of exempting the wife from civil penalty in case of her marriage. Ægisthus, again, finds it extremely difficult to corrupt Clytemnestra: and his success in inducing her to marry him entails, as if a matter of course, the murder of her former husband. The crime is mentioned by Jupiter, in the Olympian Court, as consisting of the two parts, of which he by no means specifies the latter as the more atrocious[908];
(1) γῆμ’ ἄλοχον μνηστὴν, (2) τὸν δ’ ἔκτανε νοστήσαντα.
The law of marriage differs from most other human laws in a very important particular. It is their excellence to impose the minimum of restraint, which will satisfy the absolute wants of society: but the aim and the criterion of a good law of marriage is to impose the maximum of restraint that human nature can be induced bonâ fide to accept. Doubtless there is here also a conceivable excess: but it would be and has been indicated by the general withholding of submission, or evasion of obedience. Up to that point, the restrictions of the marriage law are not evils to be endured for the sake of a greater good, but are good in themselves.
In order that this great institution may thoroughly fulfil its ends, it is especially requisite,
1. That it should not be contracted between more than one man and one woman.
2. That it should on both sides be, in the main and as a general rule, deliberate and spontaneous.