For the literature relating to marriage with a deceased wife's sister and other kindred see a footnote below and the elaborate bibliography by Huth in the work already mentioned.]
I. THE EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND THE THEORY OF THE CANON LAW
_a_) _Historical elements of the Christian teaching._--According to the spirit of the earliest Christian teaching divorce, properly so called, is strongly condemned, though by a strict interpretation of its letter it may not be entirely forbidden. Between the first assertion of the new doctrine and the final triumph of the canonical theory of absolute indissolubility of the marriage bond intervenes a struggle of twelve hundred years, whose more salient features may now be sketched in rapid outline.
To understand the influences which aided in molding the conceptions of the founders of the Christian church relative to marriage and divorce, one must first of all notice the legal and social environment. By each of the three systems of law with which originally the Christians were most acquainted marriage was treated as a private or lay contract, and its dissolution was therefore freely allowed. Among the early Greeks, at any rate in the Homeric age, divorce is thought, on slender evidence, to have been entirely unknown,[1] although the practice arose later. By the Athenian law, which probably was not entirely supplanted by the Roman until 212 A.D.,[2] it was freely granted to either spouse. The benefit inured, however, mainly to the husband, since to begin proceedings for a divorce the wife was required to present in person to the archon a written statement of her desire; and this, in a society where popular sentiment relegated woman to a seclusion truly oriental, it was in practice exceedingly hard to do.[3]
[Footnote 1: HOMER, _Odyssey_, x, 58; xxii, 38. _Cf._ MEIER-SCHÖMANN, _Der attische Process_, II, 510; GEFFCKEN, _Ehescheidung vor Gratian_, 12; GLASSON, _Le mariage civil et le divorce_, 151; HRUZA, _Polygamie und Pellikat_, 64 n. 7.]
[Footnote 3: Thus Alcibiades "collected a band of men and dragged" his wife Hipparete from the archon, when she attempted to get a divorce on account of his licentiousness: WOOLSEY, _Divorce and Divorce Legislation_, 31. _Cf._ GEFFCKEN, _op. cit._, 12, 13; and in general on the Grecian law of divorce see MEIER-SCHÖMANN, _Der attische Process_, II, 510-13; MÜLLER, _Handbuch der Alterthumswissenschaft_; MÜLLER AND BAUER'S _Die griech. Privat- und Kriegsalterthümer_ (1893), 152; POPP, _Ehescheidung_, 12-18; TISSOT, _Le mariage_, 53 ff.; GLASSON, _Mariage civil et le divorce_, 151-53; WOOLSEY, _op. cit._, 25-34. The unfavorable position of the Athenian woman is discussed by HRUZA, _Die Ehebegründung nach attischem Rechte_, 21, 22; GIDE, _La femme_, 63 ff., 74 ff.; COMBIER, _Du divorce_, 17 ff.; TEBBS, _Essay_, 44 ff.]