The fact will doubtless be borne in mind that at the time Mr. Buckle penned these words comparatively little concerning the construction or organization of primitive society was known. That one ethnical period and a half prior to the earliest age of the historic Greeks, woman’s influence was supreme in the family and in the gens, that descent was reckoned in the female line, and that all rights of succession were traced through mothers, are facts with which this writer was evidently unacquainted; hence, we are not surprised that in contemplating a social phenomenon like that presented by the diminution of woman’s influence during the ages between Homer and Plato, he should have been at a loss to account for it, and that he should have declared that the “causes of these inconsistencies would form a curious subject for investigation.” Mr. Lecky, also, in referring to the same subject, says: A broad line must, however, be drawn between the legendary or poetical period, as reflected in Homer and perpetuated in the tragedians, and the later historical period. It is one of the most remarkable, and to some writers one of the most perplexing, facts in the moral history of Greece, that in the former and ruder period women had undoubtedly the highest place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection.[176] [176] _European Morals_, vol. ii., p. 295. Of marriage in the legendary period of Greek history, Mr. Grote says: We find the wife occupying a station of great dignity and influence, though it was the practice for the husband to purchase her by valuable presents to her parents.... She even seems to live less secluded and to enjoy a wider sphere of action than was allotted to her in historical Greece.... A large portion of the romantic interest which Grecian legend inspires is derived from the women.[177] [177] _History of Greece_, vol. ii., p. 83. From the facts which have been brought to light in relation to the position occupied by women in the age in which Homer wrote, it may be observed that much of the seeming inconsistency noticed by Mr. Buckle, Mr. Lecky, Mr. Grote, and others, between the picture of Greek life as it appeared at this time, and that noticed six or seven centuries later in the age of Plato, may be easily explained. The triumph of the male over the female in human society as exemplified amongst the earliest Greeks, was of such a recent date that the influence of women was not wholly extinct, and the deference due them had not entirely given place to that lofty contempt and biting scorn which characterized the treatment of women by Greek men at a later stage of their career.