The formation of this large circle of relationships by affinity is the correlative to a well-defined strictness in the marriage law. For these relationships would mean nothing, but would simply betoken and even breed confusion, unless marriage were perpetual and incest eschewed.
Friedreich[934] truly observes, that the law of incest, instead of being tightened, was relaxed at a later period in Greece; a very decided mark of moral retrogression, which cannot be cancelled by all the splendours of her history.
Fidelity in married life.
5. We come now to the remaining question; how was this great obligation practically observed in the Greece of the heroic age?
Part, at least, of the answer is easy to give. By women it was observed admirably. Except only in the case of Anteia, two generations old, there is no instance in Homer of a woman who seeks the breach of it. The forcible or half forcible seduction[935], and progressive contamination, of a part of the unmarried women who belong to the household of Ulysses, is one of the three great crimes which draw down from Heaven such fearful vengeance upon the Suitors. Of the παλλακὶς, we hear but twice in the poems; nor can we say that this word meant more than a concubine[936]. Among the Greek chieftains, cases of homicide are more frequent than those of bastardy. And when such instances are mentioned, it is not in the hardened manner of later times.
It is something at least that, in such matters, a nation should be alive to shame. We have various signs that this was so in Greece. One of them is the tender expression[937]:
παρθένος αἰδοίη, ὑπερώϊον εἰσαναβᾶσα.
It must be remembered, when we touch upon these morbid parts in human life and nature, that the society of that period did not avail itself of the expedient of the professional corruption of a part of womankind in order to relieve the virtue of the residue from assault.
Among the Greek chieftains and their families, Polydore, a sister of Achilles, had a spurious son[938]. Nestor[939] sprang from a father of spurious birth. Each Ajax had a spurious brother. Only Menelaus of all the chiefs is mentioned as having himself had an illegitimate son. This son, who has the touching name of Megapenthes, was born to him by a slave, evidently after the rape of Helen; he was apparently recognised in part; his marriage was celebrated at the same time with that of his legitimate sister Hermione, but it was contracted with a person of lower station. He was τηλύγετος, the last as well as the first; though Helen, owing, as the Poet intimates, to a divine decree, had no more children, with whom to console her husband, after her return from the abduction.
The superior rank conferred by lawful birth is in every case strongly marked; and this perhaps is the reason why we never find the succession to sovereignty in Greece disturbed by illegitimate offspring.