The rapid extension of the field of Greek knowledge of other peoples’ customs, which resulted from the voyages and settlements of the seventh century, no less than the severe strain which the economic evolution in that century and the next put upon the very framework of society in Greek states, led inevitably, as we know, to very reasonable scepticism as to the naturalness of patriarchal institutions in themselves: and this not only among the Physicists. We have hints of it in the Lyric, and explicit discussion in the Drama. ‘Is a man nearer akin to his father or to his mother?’ that is the point on which for Aeschylus the fate of Orestes turns in the last resort. The Apollo of Aeschylus, Λητοίδης though he be, is on the side of the angels, but his proof belongs to a phase of observation which, while it conforms precisely to the patriarchal jurisprudence, was obsolete already for Hippocrates. The _Andromache_ and the _Medea_ of Euripides mark in due course the turn of the tide, even in Drama; and, with the feminist plays of Aristophanes, we are in full course for the _Republic_ of Plato, the fine flower, on this side of the subject, of the conviction (which is really pre-Socratic) that social organization, like any other, is at bottom a matter of the adaptation of natural means to ends. Of this controversy Herodotus is no mere spectator. It can hardly be a chance that every one of the strange marriage customs which he mentions happens to be typical of a widespread type of observance; and that the series of them taken together forms an analysis of such types which is almost complete between the extremes of promiscuous union with classificatory relationship on the one hand, and normal patriarchal monogamy on the other. Herodotus is of course not writing a history of Human Marriage, or of Woman’s Rights; it is only as a current topic of controversy that such matters come into his story at all; but, when they do, I think we can see that his contribution to them is not quite a casual one; that he is not simply emptying an ill-filled notebook on to the margins of his history; but that where he digresses he does so to fill a gap in current knowledge, with materials which, if not new, are at all events well authenticated; and that these materials have partly been elicited by his own interest in specific problems which were burning questions at the moment.