In the Homeric poems we read much about young women who were captured
and forced to become the concubines of the men who had slain their
fathers, brothers, and husbands. Other brides are referred to as
[Greek: alphesiboiai], wooed with rich presents, literally "bringing
in oxen." Among other ancient nations--Assyrians, Hebrews,
Babylonians, Chaldeans, etc., brides had to be bought with property or
its equivalent in service (as in the case of Jacob and Rachel).
Serving for a bride until the parents feel repaid for their selfish
trouble in bringing her up, also prevails among savages as low as the
African Bushman and the Fuegian Indians, and is not therefore, as
Herbert Spencer holds, a higher or later form of "courtship" than
capture or purchase. But it is less common than purchase, which has
been a universal custom. "All over the earth," says Letourneau (137),
"among all races and at all times, wherever history gives us
information, we find well-authenticated examples of marriage
by purchase, which allows us to assert that during the
middle period of civilization, the right of parents over
their children, and especially over their daughters,
included in all countries the privilege of selling them."
In Australia a knife or a glass bottle has been held sufficient
compensation for a wife. A Tartar parent will sell his daughter for a
certain number of sheep, horses, oxen, or pounds of butter; and so on
in innumerable regions. As an obstacle to free choice and love unions,
nothing more effective could be devised; for what Burckhardt writes
(_B. and W._, I., 278) of the Egyptian peasant girls has a general
application. They are, he says, "sold in matrimony by their fathers
_to the highest bidders_; a circumstance that frequently causes the
most mean and unfeeling transactions."
In his collection of Esthonian folk-songs Neus has a poem which
pathetically pictures the fate of a bartered bride. A girl going to
the field to cut flax meets a young man who informs her bluntly that
she belongs to him, as he has bought her. "And who undertook to sell
me?" she asks. "Your father and mother, your sister and brother," he
replies, adding frankly that he won the father's favor with a present
of a horse, the mother's with a cow, the sister's with a bracelet, the
brother's with an ox. Then the unwilling bride lifts her voice and
curses the family: "May the father's horse rot under him; may the
mother's cow yield blood instead of milk!" Hundreds of millions of
bartered brides have borne their fate more meekly. It is needless to
add that what has been said here applies _a fortiori_ to captured
brides.