American notions the marriage of convenience arranged by the parents is hardly warranted to produce domestic felicity. But the hero of Greek comedy often selected a mistress for graces of mind and person and afterward, when her legitimate birth was discovered, gladly made her his wife. At least such matches ought to have resulted happily. Yet surprisingly little is ever said of married bliss and affection arising from any sort of union. While this social situation prevented the ancient dramatist from introducing certain scenes which are the stock in trade of the modern playwright, in one respect it was of service to him. Since practically no attention was paid to the girl’s wishes in such matters and almost none to the youth’s, the speed with which engagements could be made and unmade or consummated in wedlock aided materially in observing the unity of time. The plots and concentrated action of many plays in the New Comedy (cf. for example Terence’s _Andrian Girl_) would be quite impossible if women in such a case were not passive and helpless instruments in the hands of others. Professor Lounsbury (_op. cit._, pp. 120 ff.) has convincingly shown what a stumbling-block the unity of time proved to the classical dramatists of Western Europe who tried to conform to the unities but lived in a society to which such rapidity in courtship was repugnant. In Greek tragedy the representation of women is strikingly different from that in comedy. Whereas in this respect the latter reacted to the usage of contemporaneous society, tragedy reverted to the practice of Homer. In the _Iliad_ women like Helen and Andromache, suitably attended, not only traverse the Trojan streets but appear on the walls and among the men without losing caste or being regarded as immodest; and though Helen’s elopement with his brother was the source of all Troy’s present woes, Hector addresses her with far more consideration than he shows the wayward Paris. In the fourth book of the _Odyssey_ she assists Menelaus at their Spartan home in entertaining the strangers from Ithaca and Pylus, and freely participates in the conversation without embarrassment and as an equal. How faithful a picture these poems present of the social situation in Homer’s own day is largely beside the question, since it is evident that they portray the events of a bygone age, viz., the close of that “Aegean” or “Minoan” civilization which has been unearthed by Schliemann on the Greek mainland and more recently by Evans and others in Crete. It is certain that women must have lived on a footing of greater equality with the men than in any other ancient civilization, and we see in the frescoes of Knossos conclusive indications of an open and easy association of men and women, corresponding to our idea of “Society,” at the Minoan Court unparalleled till our own day.[352]