[85]
Now take, please, the law bearing upon these
matters, and read it; for I would have you know that a woman of her character,
who has done what she has done, ought not only to have kept aloof from these
sacred rites, to have abstained from beholding them, from offering sacrifices,
and from performing on the city's behalf any of the ancestral rites which usage
demands, but that she should have been excluded also from all other religious
ceremonials in Athens. For a woman who has been taken in adultery is not
permitted to attend any of the public sacrifices, although the laws have given
both to the alien woman and the slave the right to attend these, whether to view
the spectacle or to offer prayer.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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