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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]

      In Od. i. 278, ii. 196, Telemachus is bidden to take his mother to her father, "they will give the marriage feast and ἀρτυνέουσιν ἔεδνα, many such as should follow with a dear daughter." Mr. Murray says that the writer of these lines "mistook the meaning of estim because he had forgotten the custom" (R. G. E. p. 152). But even Aeschylus knew that ἔεδνα were gifts from the bridegroom (Prometheus, 559, quoted by Mr. Murray); and if the author of the passages in Odyssey, i. ii., did not know, he cannot have read the Iliad and Odyssey. This is so improbable, for even the author of the very "late" song of Ares and Aphrodite (Od. viii. 318) knew all about the legal nature of ἔεδνα, that we can hardly suppose the writer of the passages in Od. i. ii. to have fancied that ἔεδνα meant "dowry."

      

      "coughs and spits,

       And with a palsy fumbling in his gorget,

       Shakes in and out the rivet,"

      in "a night-alarm." Shakespeare has read of the night-alarm in Iliad, Book x., but not there did he find, nowhere in Homer could he find "the faint defects of age" made matter of merriment. In Homer nobody coughs!

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