It is interesting to find here that the curses were recited at the Anthesteria, a festival of ghosts, and the Herakleia, an obvious hero festival, and at the Dia—this last surely a festival of imprecation like the Diasia. On the strength of these _Dirae_ of Teos, recited at public and primitive festivals, it might not be rash to conjecture that at the Thesmophoria some form of θεσμοί or binding spells was recited as well as carried. This conjecture becomes almost a certainty when we examine an important inscription[366] found near Pergamos and dealing with the regulations for mourning in the city of Gambreion in Mysia. The mourning laws of the ancients bore harder on women than on men, a fact explicable not by the general lugubriousness of women, nor even by their supposed keener sense of convention, but by those early matriarchal conditions in which relationship naturally counted through the mother rather than the father. Women, the law in question enacts, are to wear dark garments; men if they ‘did not wish to do this’ might relax into white; the period of mourning is longer for women than for men. Next follows the important clause: ‘the official who superintends the affairs of women, who has been chosen by the people at the purifications that take place _before the Thesmophoria_, is to invoke blessings on the men who abide by the law and the women who obey the law that they may happily enjoy the goods they possess, but on the men who do not obey and the women who do not abide therein he is to invoke the contrary, and such women are to be accounted impious, and it is not lawful for them to make any sacrifice to the gods for the space of ten years, and the steward is to write up this law on two stelae and set them up, the one _before the doors of the Thesmophorion_, the other before the temple of Artemis Lochia.’ From the _Thesmophoriazusae_ of Aristophanes we learn almost nothing of the ritual of the Thesmophoria, save the fact that the feast was celebrated on the Pnyx[367]: but the fashion in which the woman-herald prays is worth noting; she begins by a real prayer[368]: ‘I bid you pray to Gods and Goddesses That in Olympus and in Pytho dwell And Delos, and to all the other gods.’ But when she comes to what she really cares about, she breaks into the old habitual curse formularies: ‘If any plots against the cause of Woman Or peace proposes to Euripides Or to the Medes, or plots a tyranny, Or if a female slave in her master’s ear Tells tales, or male or female publican Scants the full measure of our legal pint— _Curse him that he may miserably perish,_ _He and his house_,—but for the rest of you Pray that the gods may give you all good things.’