ought to rest satisfied with that happiness; if it was unhappy he must be out of his senses to risk being so again." In the absence, or on the death, of the husband the son seems to have directed the actions of his mother. Telemachus thus speaks to the virtuous Penelope, " Go to thy chamber; attend to thy work; turn thy spinning-wheel, weave the linen; see that thy servants do their tasks. Speech be longs to men; and especially to me, who am the master here." Penelope, like a welltrained woman, meekly allows herself to be silenced, and obeys " bearing in mind the sage discourse of her son." In Athens all that a husband had to do to divorce his wife, was to bid her (probably in the presence of a witness) to go back to the home of her guardian and take her dowry with her. On the other hand, if a wife wished to divorce her husband against his will, she had to go herself to the archon's office and present him with a written state ment as to why she dismissed her husband; ill-treatment was a sufficient reason. The laws relating to the wife's dowry were some protection against capricious divorce; and her rights of inheritance, also, much involved the question. " The riches that a wife brings only serve to make her divorce more difficult," sadly complains a character in Euripides. If a man repudiated his wife he had to return her dowry, or pay heavy in terest on it. Moreover her guardian could claim a pension from him for her mainte nance. If, however, she had by her behavior given a legal ground for the separation, her dowry was forfeited. Doubtless the law limited the freedom of divorce; not every reason was accepted as sufficient legal ground for repudiating either husband or wife. In certain cases divorce was compulsory; the husband had to put away the wife if she was taken in adultery; and the wife had to divorce her husband if he lost his freedom. Adultery on his part was not sufficient reason for his being di
vorced; her only remedy was an action for separation; and apparently she could only succeed in this in cases of special gravity, and where her rights as mistress of the house had been grossly infringed. A father could divorce his married daugh ter from her husband; the husband could give his wife in marriage to another man; and the next of kin having a legal claim to an heiress and her property could, if she was already married, divorce her from her husband, and marry her himself. In Sparta marriage was regarded chiefly, if not exclusively, as the means by which families might be kept up and the necessary number of citizens maintained; hence the dissolution of a marriage, if through the failure of issue its object had not been at tained, was not only easily effected, but was even ordered by law. According to Herod otus two kings of Sparta were compelled to repudiate their wives on account of sterility. Our Henry VIII had to part with some of his wives for the same reason. It is probable that divorce was not very common among the Greeks. The fact that although polygamy was forbidden, con cubinage was permitted may partly account for this. Utility, appropriateness and the sense of the beautiful, were the only guides the Greeks could find to regulate them in the relation of the sexes to each other. The influence which the one sex exercised on the other was, they thought, caused by " a divine power," the most irresistible of all. It swayed the gods themselves. Hence their religion taught them forbearance and com passion towards the wanderings of love. As Dejanira says, in Sophocles, " Whoever re sists love in a hand-to-hand combat, like a boxer, is not wise. He sways even the gods as he wishes, and me myself also; and how should he not sway another woman who is even such as I am? So that if I find fault with my husband caught with this desire, or with this woman, the cause along with him of
