Marriage and Divorce
Upon marriage women became the legal wards of their husbands, as they previously had
been of their fathers while still unmarried. Marriages were arranged by men. A woman's
guardian1—her father, or if he were dead, her uncle or her
brother—would commonly betroth her to another man's son while she was still a
child, perhaps as young as five. The betrothal was an important public event conducted
in the presence of witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the phrase that
expressed the primary aim of marriage:
“I give you this woman for the
plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.”2 The marriage itself customarily took place
when the girl was in her early teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older. Hesiod
advised a man to marry a virgin in the fifth year after her puberty, when he himself was
“not much younger than thirty and not much older.”3 A legal marriage consisted of the bride's going to live in the house of her
husband. The procession to his house served as the ceremony. The woman brought with her
a
dowry4 of property
(perhaps land yielding an income, if she were wealthy) and personal possessions that
formed part of the new household's assets and could be inherited by her children. Her
husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry and
to return it in case of a
divorce5. Procedures for divorce were more concerned with power
than law: a husband could expel his wife from his home, while a wife, in theory, could
on her own initiative leave her husband to return to the guardianship of her male
relatives.
Her freedom of action could be constricted, however, if her husband
used force to keep her from leaving.6Except in certain cases in Sparta7, monogamy was the rule in ancient Greece, and a nuclear family structure (that
is, husband, wife, and children living together without other relatives in the same
house) was common, although at different stages of life a married couple might have
other relatives living with them. Citizen men could have sexual relations without
penalty with slaves, foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or willing preadult citizen
males. Citizen women had no such sexual freedom, and adultery carried harsh penalties
for wives, as well as the male adulterer, except at Sparta when a woman was childless,
the aim of the liaison was to produce children, and the husband gave his consent.
