Say It with Money

"We must pay to buy us some man's love," mourned Euripides' lovesick Medea almost 2,500 years ago. In the centuries since, many another nubile Greek girl, along with her father, has complained of this state of things; in Greece an adequate dowry is a far more important prerequisite to marriage than a pretty face. In Salonika a weary housemaid recently made the trip to the altar after having scratched for seven long years to raise the $500 demanded as a marriage settlement. A shepherd from the slopes of Mt. Olympus turned his true love down cold when her father produced only $600 of a promised $800. Even in up-to-date Athens, where marriageable women far outnumber available men, the man who marries for love alone is considered a crackpot. "If I worked like Superman," complained the Athenian father of eight daughters recently, "I still couldn't get together enough money for their dowries."

Faced with a growing population of unmarried women, the village fathers of 17 villages in south-central Greece have written an open letter to Queen Frederika asking her to help abolish the dowry system altogether. "This system," wrote the rural elders, "has become a nightmare to families with daughters." Local swains were asking as much as $1,300 in British gold sovereigns* in addition to housefuls of fathers' furniture as the price of their devotion. "These fathers are now deeply in debt," said one patriarch.

It was doubtful that popular Queen Frederika, for all the ardor of her feminism, could do much to save the situation. The local bishop was not at all encouraging. "The whole mentality of the country would have to change," he said last week. Added a Greek feminist: "The women of Greece are not yet ready for economic independence. As long as they have to depend on men, they will be at their mercy."

* No longer in use in Britain itself.

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