It is a very remarkable circumstance, that, of the two great poems of Homer, each should in its own way bear emphatic testimony to this great, and, for all countries that can bear it, this most precious law.
Neither poem presents us with any case of a divorced wife; of a couple between whom the marriage tie, after having once been duly formed, had ceased to subsist. And each poem in its own way raises this negative evidence to a form of the greatest cogency, from its happening to present the very circumstances under which, if under any, the dissolution of the bond would have been acknowledged.
In the Iliad, the wife of Menelaus, his κουριδίη ἄλοχος, has been living for many years in de facto adultery with Paris. The line between marriage on the one hand, and continued cohabitation together with public recognition on the other, being faintly drawn, Helen is familiarly known in Troy as the wife of Paris; so she is called by the Poet, and so she calls herself[918]. Menelaus, too, is described as her former husband[919]. Whether this was a mere acquiescence in a certain state of facts, or the regular result of more relaxed usages respecting marriage in Troy, may be doubtful. But it is clear that the view of the Greeks was directly opposite. They never speak of Paris as the husband of Helen. In their estimation, all the rights of Menelaus remained entire; and, as we shall see, it appears that, even while the possession of them was withheld from him, he acknowledged the reciprocal obligations. Nay, Hector himself seems to describe Helen as still the wife of Menelaus; γνοίης χ’ οἵου φωτὸς ἔχεις θαλερὴν παράκοιτιν[920]. The war was (so to speak) juridically founded on the fact, that the lawful marriage was not dissolved by adultery, even with the addition of all that followed: that the relation of Helen to her ancient husband was unchanged. Accordingly, Agamemnon recollects with pain, that if his brother should die, he will no longer be in a condition to demand her restoration, and to enforce it by arms, for his soldiers will forthwith return home[921].
The result is in full conformity with this view. When the war ends, Helen resumes her place as a matter of course in the house of Menelaus. She bears it with unconstrained and perfect dignity; and her relations to her husband carry no mark of the woful interval, except that its traces indelibly remain in her own penitential shame.
It is plain that the Greeks heartily detested the crime of adultery: for one of the three great chapters of accusation against the Suitors is, that they wooed the wife of Ulysses in his lifetime[922]. But it is not less plain that they knew nothing of the idea, that by that crime it was placed in the power of any person to obtain or to confer a release from the obligations of marriage.
Next to adultery, desertion or prolonged absence has afforded the most favoured plea for the destruction, so far as human law can destroy it, of the marriage bond. And indeed it is hardly possible to push the opposite doctrine to its extreme, and to say that no married person may remarry, except with demonstrative evidence of the death of the original husband or wife respectively. Probably, however, no period of the world has exhibited a more stringent application of the doctrine of indissolubility to the case of desertion, than that on which the plot of the Odyssey is founded; where, after an absence of the husband prolonged to the twentieth year, Penelope still waits his return; prays that death may relieve her from the dread necessity of making a new choice; and, thus directed by her own conscience and right feeling, likewise apprehends condemnation by the public judgment in the event of her proceeding to contract a new engagement[923].
The Heroic age has left no more comely monument, than its informal, but instinctive, and most emphatic sense, thus recorded for our benefit, of the sanctity of marriage, of the closeness of the union it creates, and of the necessity of perpetuity as an element of its capacity to attain its chief ends, and to administer a real discipline to the human character.
Greek ideas of incest.
4. A further proof of the elevated estimate of marriage among the Greeks is afforded by their views, so far as they can be traced, of the offence termed incest.
The Homeric deities, indeed, were released in this respect, as in others, from all restraint. Eris, or Enuo[924], was both the sister and the concubine of Mars: Juno, the sister and the wife of Jupiter. Æolus[925], though called φίλος ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσιν, must have been more than man; because Jupiter had made him warden of the Winds, which it was his prerogative to confine or to let loose[926]. And in virtue, I suppose, of belonging to the class of superior beings, his six daughters were, without any consciousness of offence, the wives, the αἰδοῖαι ἄλοχοι, of his six sons[927].