A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom Read Free Book Online Page A

rushed to the doors and each stood moved with wonder.

    Like the women spectators along the route, we get to glimpse some of the festivities lavished on a wedding. 18
    Once the bride had been ushered into her new home, the attendants stood outside and sang the epithalamium, or song for the wedding chamber. The newlyweds enclosed in the bridal chamber were expected to consummate their union, an act by which the husband took full possession of his wife. From this point on, the bride’s husband would replace her father as her kyrios (guardian and master). Aristotle (384–322 B . C . E .) distinguished between the “statesman-like” rule of the husband over his wife and the “royal” rule of a father over his child, but whatever the gradations of difference in authority, he upheld the con- ventional view that “the male is more fitted to rule than the female” ( Politics I:12).
    Despite the conventions, laws, and ceremonies that propped up ancient Greek marriage, it was by no means an irreversible affair. In Athenian society, a wife did not enter definitively into her husband’s family until she had given him a child. Until that moment, her father could terminate the marriage at any time, usually for reasons that had to do with family property; then the father would become, once again, his daughter’s kyrios . Moreover, a husband could repudiate a wife at will, without justification, but only if he were willing to give back the dowry.
    Although heterosexual marriage was the only legally recognized form of couplehood in classical Greece, husbands were by no means limited to sexual relations with their wives. They could find supple- mental sex beyond the marriage bed with concubines, male and female slaves, male and female prostitutes, and male and female lovers. The only officially forbidden fruit was the wife of another citizen. The orator Apollodorus is often quoted as saying that the Athenian man could have three women: his wife for producing heirs and watching over his property, his concubine for daily attention to his body (mean- ing sexual relations), and hetaeras (courtesans) for pleasure. 19
    Wives, on the other hand, were segregated from men other than their husbands, and severely punished if caught with a lover. At the least, a woman’s husband would divorce her and send her back to her family of origin. In one notorious instance, an incensed Athenian hus- band named Euphiletos killed his wife’s lover, Eratosthenes, and then won his case in court as justifiable homicide. Having caught the adul- terous pair sleeping together, Euphiletos had thrown his wife’s naked lover to the ground, tied his hands, refused his offer of a compensatory sum of money, and killed him on the spot. When brought to trial for murder, the husband successfully defended himself with a speech pre- pared by a well-known man of letters, Lysias, who subsequently recorded the incident for posterity. Apparently the tribunal was con- vinced that Euphiletos had acted not only in his own self-interest, but also in the interest of the Athenian city-state, since adultery, were it to go unpunished, could undermine the whole social order. Such was the rationale for a husband’s murderous revenge in 400 B . C . E . 20
    At the same time, the law offered few recourses for injured wives. Even the most horrendous marriages could not be terminated at the behest of the wife, especially after the birth of a child. Her only recourse to an abusive husband was to abandon the conjugal roof—a process requiring authorization from the archon (one of the nine chief magis- trates)—and to return to the custody of her father or another appointed kyrios . A special law looked out for the interests of the woman who had been married only for her money and then ignored by her husband after she had produced an heir; she could compel him by law to have sexual relations with her at least three times a month. (Try to imagine how the wife was able to enforce such a