More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of sham
capture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly. Left to
themselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all the
girls in each district _must_ do the same thing, however silly. About
the real feelings of the girls these comedies tell us nothing
whatever. With coyness--that is, a woman's concealment of her feelings
toward a man she likes--these actions have no more to do than the man
in the moon has with anthropology. Least of all do they tell us
anything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether they
favor a man or not. Regarding the absence of love we have, moreover,
the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kreutzwald (Schroeder, 233). That
marriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense,
so far as the Esthonians are concerned; for "the parties concerned
usually play a passive rôle.... Love is not one of the requisites, it
is an unknown phenomenon." Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of
their marriages. The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is
a good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while
she is spinning, thrashing, or combing flax.
"Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual
for a suitor who has been refused in one place and another
to proceed at once to a third or fourth.... Many a
bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony
of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed
for asking: 'Which of these girls is my bride?'"
GREEK AND ROMAN MERCENARY COYNESS
So far our search for that coyness which is an ingredient of modern
love has been in vain. At the same time it is obvious that since
coyness is widely prevalent at the present day it must have been in
the past of use to women, else it would not have survived and
increased. The question is: how far down in the scale of civilization
do we find traces of it? The literature of the ancient Greeks
indicates that, in a certain phase and among certain classes, it was
known to them. True, the respectable women, being always locked up and
having no choice in the selecting of their partners, had no occasion
for the exercise of any sort of coyness. But the hetairai appear to
have understood the advantages of assumed disdain or indifference in
making a coveted man more eager in his wooing. In the fifteenth of
Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi] we read about a wanton who locked
her door to her lover because he had refused to pay her two talents
for the privilege of exclusive possession. In other cases, the poets
still feel called upon to teach these women how to make men submissive
by withholding caresses from them. Thus in Lucian, Pythias exclaims:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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