paid for a girl—­by Iphidamas, for instance, who fell in battle, “far from his bride, of whom he had known no joy, and much had he given for her; first a hundred kine he gave, and thereafter promised a thousand, goats and sheep together.”  The idea, too, occurs over and over again that among the suitors the one who has the richest gifts to offer should take the bride.  How much this mercenary, unceremonious, and often cruel treatment of women was a matter of course among these Greeks is indicated by Homer’s naive epithet for brides, [Greek:  parthenoi alphesiboiai], “virgins who bring in oxen.”  And this is the state of affairs which Gladstone sums up by saying “there is a certain authority of the man over the woman; but it does not destroy freedom”!

The early Greeks were always fighting, and the object of their wars, as among the Australian savages, was usually woman, as Achilles frankly informs us when he speaks of having laid waste twelve cities and passed through many bloody days of battle, “warring with folk for their women’s sake.” (Iliad, IX., 327.) Nestor admonishes the Greeks to “let no man hasten to depart home till each have lain by some Trojan’s wife” (354-55).  The leader of the Greek forces issues this command regarding the Trojans: 

“Of them let not one escape sheer estruction at our hands, not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb; let not even him escape, but all perish together out of Ilios, uncared for and unknown” (VI., 57);

while Homer, with consummate art, paints for us the terrors of a captured city, showing how the women—­of all classes—­were maltreated: 

“As a woman wails and clings to her dear husband, who falls for town and people, seeking to shield his home and children from the ruthless day; seeing him dying, gasping, she flings herself on him with a piercing cry; while men behind, smiting her with the spears on back and shoulder, force her along to bondage to suffer toil and trouble; with pain most pitiful her cheeks are thin....” (Odyssey, VIII., 523-30.)[298]

LOVE IN SAPPHO’S POEMS

Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.

Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark.  She may have possibly deserved the epithet of the “tenth Muse,” bestowed on her by ancient writers, or of “the Poetess,” as Homer was “the Poet.”  Among the one hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty—­the following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and in much the same style—­suggesting a picture in a few words, with the distinctness of a painting: