Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/136

112, and was not careful to distinguish what was common in his own times from what was archaic. Or, as Mr. E. S. Hartland suggests, it is perhaps more probable that the older customs which had not quite disappeared would cease to be understood. They would be used for artistic purposes without adequate knowledge of their meaning; and new explanations would have been invented, and these theories would, if not fully accepted by the poet, at least add to the general vagueness and uncertainty as to the old customs.

So, again, it is not clear from the narrative as we have it how far Penelope was to be compelled to marry any particular man against her will. Antinous proposes that she should marry "whomsoever her father commands and whoso is pleasing to her." Antinous and Eurymachus say that they will not depart till she marries him of the Achaians whom she will. Apparently, then, she is to be compelled to marry someone, but she is allowed a certain choice in selecting the man whom she is to marry : a state of things which can hardly be primitive, the conception halting between two opinions. The earlier rule would probably be that the brethren of her late lord decided her fate without consulting her wishes in the matter. Later on, the custom arose that she married whomsoever her husband selected by his will and testament. In Homeric custom it was good law that the father, at least in the case of the first marriage, selected a bride for his son : this we see to have been the case from the speech of Achilles to the envoys. Iliad, ix., 394 With this we may compare the case of the Basutos, where the father chooses the "great wife" for his son; the others are articles of hixury with which the family has no concern (Cassalis, The Basutos p. 186, seqq.). Among the Sinhalese the father provides a wife for his son when he is grown up ; among the Kalmucks the parents choose, but the youth has power to refuse the wife selected for him. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 138, 224. But I suspect that the possibility of Penelope being allowed a