The monogamous Greeks were not often guilty of such atrocities, but
their custom (nearly universal and not confined to Athens, as is often
erroneously stated) of locking up their women in the interior of the
houses, shutting them off from almost everything that makes life
interesting, betrays a kind of jealousy hardly less selfish than that
of the savages who disposed of their wives as they pleased. It
practically made slaves and prisoners of them, quite in the Oriental
style. Such a custom indicates an utter lack of sympathy and
tenderness, not to speak of the more romantic ingredients of love,
such as adoration and gallantry; and it implies a supreme contempt for
and distrust of, character in wives, all the more reprehensible
because the Greeks did not value purity _per se_ but only for
genealogical reason, as is proved by the honors they paid to the
disreputable hetairai. There are surprisingly few references to
masculine jealousy in Greek erotic literature. The typical Greek lover
seems to have taken rivalry as blandly as the hero of Terence's play
spoken of in the last chapter, who, after various outbursts of
sentimentality, is persuaded, in a speech of a dozen lines, to share
his mistress with a rich officer. Nor can I see anything but maudlin
sentimentality in such conceits as Meleager utters in two of his poems
(_Anthology_, 88, 93) in which he expresses jealousy of sleep, for its
privilege of closing his mistress's eyes; and again of the flies which
suck her blood and interrupt her slumber.
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