Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/115

 SLAVERY IN LEGENDARY GREECE. 99 females, more numerous than the males, and performing the principal work in the interior of the house. Not only do they seem to have been more harshly treated than the males, but they were charged with the hardest and most exhausting labor which the establishment of a Greek chief required: they brought in water from the spring, and turned by hand the house-mills, which ground the large quantity of flour consumed in his family. 1 This oppressive task was performed generally by female slaves, in his- torical as well as legendary Greece. 2 Spinning and weaving was the constant occupation of women, whether free or slave, of every rank and station : all the garments worn both by men and women were fashioned at home, and Helen as well as Penelope is expert and assiduous at the occupation. 3 The daughters of Keleos at Eleusis go to the well with their basins for water, and Nausikaa, daughter of Alkinous, 4 joins her female slaves in the business of washing her garments in the river. If we are obliged to point out the fierceness and insecurity of an early society, we may at the same time note with pleasure its characteristic simplicity of 1 Odyss. vii. 104; xx. 116; Iliad vi. 457; compare the Book of Genesis, ch. xi. 5. The expression of Telemachus, when he is proceeding to haim up che female slaves who had misbehaved, is bitterly contemptuous : M# fie v drj a i? a p cj & ava TV uxb tivfibv eAoiftTjv Tuuv, etc. (Odyss. xxii. 464.) The humble establishment of Hesiod's farmer does not possess a mill ; he has nothing better than a wooden pestle and mortar for grinding or bruising the corn ; both are constructed, and the wood cut from the trees, by his own hand (Opp. Pi. 423), though it seems that a professional carpenter ("the servant of Athene,") is required to put together the plough (v. 430). The Virgilian poem Me/return, (v. 24,) assigns a hand-mill even to the humblest rural establishment The instructive article " Corn Mills," in Beckmann's Hist, of Inventions (vol. i. p. 227, Eng. transl.), collects all the information available, about this subject. 3 See Lysias, Or. 1, p. 93 (De Caede Eratosthenis). Plutarch (Non posse suavitervivi secundum Epicurum, c. 21, p. 1101), II a^t/ff/teAwf afarpif 77-pdf jivkriv Kivovfj.V7j, and Kallimachus. (Hymn, ad Delum, 242,) /j<i' 6&i dfi/lat AVOTOKE<; poyiovaiv uAcrptdec, notice the overworked condition of these women. The "grinding slaves" (aAerpMec) are expressly named in one of the Laws of Ethelbert, king of Kent, and constitute the second class in point of value among the female slaves (Law xi. Thorpe's Ancient Laws and Tnsti- totes of England^ol. i, p. T).
 * Odyss. iv. 131 xix 235. 4 Odyss. vi. 96 ; Hymn, ad Demetr. 105