When the customs of the ancient Dorians are viewed without prejudice, the fact will doubtless be observed that they originated not in a depraved and licentious state of society, but, on the contrary, that they were the direct result of that freedom of action which characterizes purity of life and a high standard of thought and action.
According to Wilford, the Greeks were the descendants of the Yavanas of India. This writer observes that the Pandits insist that the words _Yavana_ and _Yoni_ are derived from the same root, _Yu_, and that when the Ionians emigrated they adopted this name to distinguish themselves as adorers of the female, in opposition to a strong sect of male worshippers which had been driven from the mother country.[224] Under the constantly increasing importance of the male, however, both in human affairs and in the god-idea, they subsequently became ashamed of their religious title and sought to abandon it. Of the aversion felt in Greece for this name Herodotus says:
[224] See Hargrave Jennings, _Phallicism_.
The Athenians and most of the Ionic states over the world went so far in their dislike of the name as actually to lay it aside; and even at the present day the greater number of them seems to me to be ashamed of it.[225]
Whenever in early historic times a country was subjugated, the conquerors either murdered or enslaved the men, and utilized the women for wives, or sexual slaves. The Ionians who, according to Herodotus, sailed from Attica, without women, took for wives native Carians whose fathers they had slain; hence these captives made a law, which they bound themselves by an oath to observe, and which they handed down to their daughters after them, that “none should ever sit at meat with her husband, or call him by his name; because the invaders slew their fathers, their husbands, and their sons, and then forced them to become their wives.”[226] The terms of the oaths sworn by them at the time of the capture seem, subsequently, to have been enforced by their imperious masters.
As these women were foreigners they were entitled to little or no respect from their captors. However, as they were to become the mothers of Greek citizens, they must necessarily be “protected,” or, in other words, they must be kept in seclusion. In the time of Solon, rape committed on a free-born woman was punishable by fine.[227]