To all intents and purposes, the Attic women were slaves, with no rights and few privileges. We do not know much about them directly, as they left no record of themselves, and very little was written of them except by the satirists, who are always ready to distort the truth in order to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” Historians were strangely silent regarding them; unless of royal lineage, women were too insignificant. It is difficult, in the face of the few facts we know, to credit the brilliant Athenians with any chivalry. We must either suppose that the poets were a sour and disappointed race, or that they reflected the spirit of their time. Apart from the few great ideals that lived in the imaginations of men, everything that has come down to us shows the light estimate in which women were held. They were a lower order of beings, and anything done by their advice was invalid. “Women are an evil,” says the comedian, “and yet, my countrymen, one cannot set up a house without evil; for to be married or not to be married is alike bad.” This arrogant and contemptuous tone runs through the Attic literature, as I have shown more fully elsewhere. From the vague and shadowy outlines of a life that was practically shut out from the light of day twenty-five centuries ago, we cannot gather with certainty even the moral and domestic value of women who were treated with lofty disdain by poets, satirists, and historians alike. But we do know that intellectually they counted for nothing, within the pale of orthodox society. At a period when the central idea was culture, when art was at its zenith, and there were giants in literature, the wives and daughters of men noted before all things for brilliancy and _esprit_ had fallen into hopeless ignorance and vassalage. They lacked even the companionship and the small diversions of the Oriental harem, where the inmates, though they had only a small fraction of a husband, could break the monotony by gossiping or quarreling with the other wives. The women of the better class at Athens had special apartments, usually in the upper story, so that they could not go out without being seen. Men went to market themselves or sent their slaves. We learn from Aristophanes that they often put their wives under lock and key, with a seal when they went away, also that they kept Molossian hounds to frighten away possible lovers. A woman addressed her husband as “master,” was always a minor, and could transact no business on her own account, which even Plato thought unjust. If he died she was not his heir, but the ward of her son or of some male relative. In her marriage she was not consulted, and she was never supposed to know any man but the one chosen for her. Solon, who wished to prevent mercenary marriages, decreed that no dowries should be given, and that the bride could have only three suits of clothes; later, unions were arranged by the families, on a basis of equal fortunes.