Thersites, speaking to Agamemnon, is still more explicit--“Son of Atreus, what more dost thou require? What wilt thou? Thy tents are full of brass and of many most beautiful women, that we give first to thee, we, Acheans, when we take a town.”[466] Elsewhere, Achilles, speaking of his beloved Briseis, of whom he had been robbed, cries--“Why have the Atreides led hither this vast army? Is it not for the sake of the dark-haired Helen? Are they, then, the only men who love their wives? Every wise and good man cherishes and loves his wife. And I also loved Briseis from my heart, although she was a captive.”[467] And, a little further on, he makes a clear distinction between the slave concubine and the legitimate wife, swearing never to accept as wife a daughter of Agamemnon. In the _Odyssey_, when Ulysses enters unrecognised his own house, and sees pass before him in the vestibule his female slaves, laughing and joyous as they go to play with the suitors, his feelings are not merely those of a lawful proprietor who is offended, but of a jealous man whose harem has been violated. At first he is tempted to kill these women, which he actually does a little later, and he hears “his heart cry out in his bosom, as a bitch, turning around her young ones, barks at a stranger and tries to bite him.”[468] But such customs have prevailed here and there up to modern times. In 1548, in Peru, when Pedro de la Gasca had defeated the party of Pizarro, he distributed amongst his followers the widows of the colonists who were killed. At Asterabad, after a small local revolt, Hanway saw the Persian magistrates sell fifty women to the soldiers. In Livonia, after the taking of Narva, Peter the Great coolly sold to the boyars the wives of the inhabitants.[469] Bruce tells us also that in Abyssinia the victors habitually take possession of the wives of the vanquished.[470] But if captives serve or have served somewhat in all countries to supply the domestic concubinate, they were not the only ones reserved for this purpose; female slaves, however procured, were treated as such. The fact is so well known that I shall abstain from establishing it by examples. I only quote one observed at Sackatoo, in tropical Africa, for it proves clearly that in a barbarous country, concubinage, or the domestic and servile concubinate, does not outrage morality in any way, and is regarded merely from a commercial point of view. At Sackatoo, when a married man has intimate relations with one of the female slaves given as dowry to his wife, he need simply replace her the following day by another slave who is a virgin and of equal value. On this purely mercenary condition, the caprice of the husband never occasions any conflict with the legitimate wife.[471]