[177] _History of Greece_, vol. ii., p. 83.
From the facts which have been brought to light in relation to the position occupied by women in the age in which Homer wrote, it may be observed that much of the seeming inconsistency noticed by Mr. Buckle, Mr. Lecky, Mr. Grote, and others, between the picture of Greek life as it appeared at this time, and that noticed six or seven centuries later in the age of Plato, may be easily explained. The triumph of the male over the female in human society as exemplified amongst the earliest Greeks, was of such a recent date that the influence of women was not wholly extinct, and the deference due them had not entirely given place to that lofty contempt and biting scorn which characterized the treatment of women by Greek men at a later stage of their career.
Although later in the history of this people, mothers were not regarded as related to their own children, and although in the age of Homer relationships had begun to be reckoned through fathers, in many places this writer reveals to us the fact that the bond between mother and child was stronger than that between father and child, or that the tie between sisters and brothers of the same mother was closer than that between the children of the same father. In Apollo’s address before the assembled gods, in which he advocates the ransoming of the body of Hector by Priam and his sons, Homer puts the following words into the mouth of the oracle:
A man may lose his best-loved friend, a son, Or his own mother’s son, a brother dear.[178]
[178] _The Iliad_, book xxiv., Derby’s translation.
Numerous illustrations might be drawn from _The Iliad_ as proof of the fact that the tie between mother and child was still regarded as more binding than that between father and child. Homer doubtless represents an age in which the manner of reckoning descent was in dispute, certain tribes acknowledging only the tie between children born of the same mother, others only the bond between those of the same father, while still others acknowledge both, though with a preference for either one or the other. In the _Eumenides_ of Æschylus the idea of male descent is put forth as a new doctrine. Orestes, who has murdered his mother, Clytemnestra, asks: “Do you call me related to my mother?” Although reproaches and imprecations are heaped upon him for his inhumanity, it is found that the new doctrine in which the father is represented as the only real parent, has many adherents—that the gods have concurred in it, Athene herself having succumbed to the new faith.