The whole view of women is what we may call "northern"; it is the view of the sagas, of the English and the Teutonic epics; and is remote from the spirit of the partly orientalised poets of Ionia. But for the bequest of ancient heroic tradition the poets of Athens could not have created their noble heroines. Attic life, Ionian life, could not produce such women; and Aeschylus and Sophocles fall back on memories of heroines who are not Ionian and are not Attic, in the great majority of cases. Christian Europe at various times, in the age of the chivalrous romances, and in comedy generally, fell far below the old northern and Achaean view of the women's part. To chivalry, adultery was a duty, to our European comedy it was a jest: marriage was a _bourgeois_ business. But even to historic Greece the sanctity of the marriage-tie was a serious matter: adulterous intrigues are not the theme of Greek poets and comedians, as they have been ever since our Middle Ages. Lancelot, and still more Tristram, would have been stigmatised as Paris is by Hector; and Guinevere and Iseult would have heard more reproaches from their own sex, than Penelope and the Trojan women bestow on Helen. The Gods are a sinful and adulterous generation, in the mythical view; but in the religious view they warn Aegisthus against his sin and its consequence.[2] Turning to the legal position of women, we do not know much about the civil penalty or fine for adultery (μοιχάγρια), but Menelaus, the soul of honour, is eager to avenge himself in the duel. The fine for adultery may have been the equivalent of the bride-price paid by the bridegroom. Hephaestus, in the song of Demodocus, demands the return of the bride-price which he gave for the faithless Aphrodite, the ἔεδνα.[3] The bride-price, often mentioned, is a well-known institution, obsolete in historic Greece but familiar to the poet. In very rare cases in Homer, a man may receive a bride without paying a price for doing some great public service: in some circumstances the father will even give a dowry with the bride.[4] In the most notable passage where dowry (μείλία) is mentioned by the poet, he plainly shows his knowledge that the giving of dowry is an exception to the general rule; for he mentions the rule--the wooer pays the bride-price ἔεδνα, but in his sore need of Achilles, Agamemnon offers his daughter "without price" (ἀνάεδνον), and _plus_ such gifts as no man ever endowed his daughter with.[5] This is no proof that the poet of Book ix. lived in a later age than that of the bride-price. He merely recognises what, in an age of bride-price, must have been the fact, that in unusual circumstances, when the alliance of a man was of crucial importance to the father, he would buy instead of selling his daughter's marriage. People were never such pedants as not to infringe a custom, not sacred but a secular bargain, when strong need came on them.