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Shall I abide with my son, and keep all secure, all the things of my getting, my thralls and great high-roofed home, having respect unto the bed of my lord and the voice of the people, or even now follow with the best of the Achaeans that woos me in the halls, and gives a bride-price beyond reckoning?
This is the early form of purchase marriage, such bridal-gifts being the forerunners of the payment of a fixed bride-price. We still find purchase marriage practised side by side with beenah marriage in the countries where the transitional stage has been reached and mother-right contends with father-right. But there is stronger evidence even than these two cases.
The rule in both Iliad and Odyssey is that the wooer gives a bride-price to the father of the bride, ethna. This was the rule known even to that painfully late and un-Homeric poet who made the Song of Demodocus about the loves of Ares and Aphrodite.
I give it here, because its importance seems to me to be very great. This brings me to summarise the point we have reached. Father-right was dependent on purchase-possession and had nothing to do with actual fatherhood. The payment of a bride-price, the giving of a sister in exchange, as also marriage with a slave, gained for the husband the control over his wife and ownership of the children.
So far there is no change of manners, no introduction of the later practice, a dowry given with the bride, in place of a bride-price given to the father by the bridegroom. If the latter theory be correct the father is merely showing goodwill, and doing as the Germans did when they were in a stage of culture much earlier than the Homeric.
As soon as the women’s kindred found in their women the possibility of gaining worldly goods for themselves, they began to claim service and presents from their lovers. It was in this way for economic reasons, and for no moral considerations that the maternal marriage fell into disfavour. The payment of a bride-price was claimed, and an act of purchase was accounted essential.
The best face we can put on the matter is to say that all the Cyclic poets were recklessly independent of tradition, while all men who botched at the Iliad were very learned, and very careful to maintain harmony in their pictures of life and manners, except when they introduced changes in burial, bride-price, houses, iron, greaves, and corslets, all of them things, by the theory, modern, and when they sang in modern grammar.
But whosoever has pored over early European land tenures knows how dim our knowledge is, and will not rush to employ his lore in discriminating between the date of the Iliad and the date of the Odyssey. Not much proof of change in institutions between Iliadic and Odyssean times can be extracted from two passages about the ethna, or bride-price of Penelope.
We see just the same thing in the use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price, frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden fetter.
It is true that parents will scold a daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe decorum it is only out of respect to custom."
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