Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of Penelope. The rule in both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is that the wooer gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. This was the rule known even to that painfully late and un-Homeric poet who made the Song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. In that song the injured husband, Hephaestus, claims back the bride-price which he had paid to the father of his wife, Zeus. [Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 318.] This is the accepted custom throughout the _Odyssey_ (VI. 159; XVI. 77; XX. 335; XXI. 162; XV. 17, &c.). So far there is no change of manners, no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride, in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. But Penelope was neither maid, wife, nor widow; her husband's fate, alive or dead, was uncertain, and her son was so anxious to get her out of the house that he says he offered gifts _with_ her (XX. 342). In the same way, to buy back the goodwill of Achilles, Agamemnon offers to give him his daughter without bride-price, and to add great gifts (_Iliad_, IX. l47)--the term for the gifts is [Greek: mailia]. People, of course, could make their own bargain; take as much for their daughter as they could get, or let the gifts go from husband to bride, and then return to the husband's home with her (as in Germany in the time of Tacitus, _Germania_, 18), or do that, and throw in more gifts. But in Odyssey, II. 53, Telemachus says that the Wooers shrink from going to the house of Penelope's father, Icarius, who would endow (?) his daughter ([Greek: eednoosaito]) And again (_Odyssey_, I. 277; II. 196), her father's folk will furnish a bridal feast, and "array the [Greek: heedna], many, such as should accompany a dear daughter." Some critics think that the gifts here are _dowry_, a later institution than bride-price; others, that the father of the dear daughter merely chose to be generous, and returned the bride-price, or its equivalent, in whole or part. [Footnote: Merry, Odyssey, vol. i. p. 50. Note to Book I 277.] If the former view be correct, these passages in Odyssey, I., II. are later than the exceedingly "late" song of Demodocus. If the latter theory be correct the father is merely showing goodwill, and doing as the Germans did when they were in a stage of culture much earlier than the Homeric.