Women, Love, and Marriage in Classical Athens

If your views about matrimony run along the lines of "love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage", you can bet your sweet patoot that the carriage in question is not a Greek chariot. In classical Athens (roughly mid-5th through mid-4th century BC), love had little (if anything) to do with marriage, while women had practically no say in either. The status of women in Athens was a far cry from their dominant position in Minoan (ancient Cretan) civilization some 12 centuries before. The Athenian despoina (mistress of the house) was no Cretan snake goddess.

The Athenians got married in order to have male children and perpetuate the line. It was as simple as that. The oikos (= the household) came first, the individual came second. Always. Marriage was a social, political, and religious affair, and was planned accordingly. Under no circumstances would an Athenian young girl go out and socialize with other young people. In classical Athens, the time-honored plot of "boy meets girl" had a cruel twist to it. Boy met girl - literally - at the end of the wedding ceremony, when the bride crossed her husband's threshold and lifted the veil that covered her face. What's more, while the "girl" part was pretty accurate (most girls got married at the age of fifteen), the "boy" part was usually played by a man in his thirties (if not older). It was perfectly acceptable (even preferable) for a considerable age difference to exist between man and wife.

Legal marriage between Athenian citizens consisted of two parts: the engyesis (betrothal) and the ekdosis (literally: the giving away of the bride, i.e. the actual wedding ceremony). During the engyesis, the suitor and the father of the bride agreed on the dowry and sealed the pact of marriage through a solemn exchange of ritual phrases. The presence of the bride-to-be, believe it or not, was optional and proforma. The engyesis granted legal existence and validity to the marriage, but it did not warrant cohabitation of the betrothed; hence the second phase, the ekdosis. The ekdosis consisted of a sequence of rites and ceremonial procedures that lasted about two days. They included sacrifices to the divinities that protected the marriage bed (Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Artemis); the bridal bath; a banquet at the house of the bride's father (the wedding feast); and the procession taking the bride to the bridegroom's house.

At no point during these ceremonies was there any interaction between the bridegroom and his bride. Even during the wedding feast the men were seated separately from the women. This was not a union of love and affection between two individuals; rather it was a social ritual aimed to ensure the material well-being of the phratry, the clan. It took a thirty-year war (the Peloponnesian War), a plague, the downfall of the classical city-state, as well as the Roman influence, for this mold to break and the values of conjugal love, mutual affection, and companionship to be restored in Greece.