Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/119

Rh she wisheth and to that to which her desire runneth, and to that upon which she fixeth her mind [and obtain it for her], for thereby shalt thou make her to stay in thy house. If thou resistest her will, it is ruin to thee. Speak to her heart and show her thy love." The extremest "friend of woman" in any age might admit that these precepts are excessive; if they ever were approximately in the mores, the derision of the Greeks did not lack justification. A later writer of unspecified date warns against the "strange woman" like the writer of Proverbs : "Beware of a strange woman who is not known where she is. Do not look at her when she comes and do not know her. She is like a current of deep water, the whirling force of which one does not know. The woman whose husband is absent writes to thee every day. If there is no witness near her, she rises and spreads her net! O crime worthy of death when one hears of it." Have nothing to do with her and take a wife in thy youth, because "the best thing is one's own house," and because "a wife will give thee a son like thyself."

In Egypt in the class of nobles every woman "brought some land to her husband as dower, but daughters took it away again, so that the fortunes of a family depended on the proportion of females born in it. Each wife had her own house, given to her by her parents or her husband; thus there was no conjugal domicile and the man was not "head of the family," but a guest in his wife's house. The wife administered her own property and received a stipend from her husband; if she contributed to the expenses, she did so voluntarily. In a marriage contract of the time of Ptolemy III (247-221 B.C.) the man promises not to claim the authority of a husband,