Antoine Banier: Difference between revisions

The "calamities of ixion" refers to the mythical Greek King of Thessaly, Ixion, who refused to pay the bride-price owed to his father in law, leading to Ixion eventually treacherously murdering the father-in-law, becoming the first kin-slayer and thus an outcast.<ref>http://www.shakmyth.org/myth/131/ixion</ref> Banier is referring to the ancient custom of bride price (man paying the woman's family to be married) as being preferable to the contemporary European custom in his own era of the dowry. The dowry is a sum paid by the woman's family to the man, as this was seen as essential 'seed capital' that established a stable marriage, and also because women were often seen as such a useless burden that men would have to be incentivized to marry them. Some have claimed that the dowry also served as an incentive to induce upper-class men to marry less physically attractive upper-class women, instead of marrying prettier lower class women. This would have maintained the integrity of the class systems in place in Europe at the time.

*[[Henry Flynt]]