>“Demetrios the vine dresser deceived my daughter and took her away and keeps her hidden saying that he is going to live with her without me. She was managing my store and supported me, since I am old. But he has a wife and children so he cannot live with a woman he deceived. Please help me, an old woman, to return my daughter back to me.”

Looks like scoundrels exist in any age.

I will note that you have only one side of the story and that side is not the girl in question. It is possible her version of events would be that she escaped a life of hardship working herself to the bone to support an elderly parent with an excess sense of entitlement.

I suppose a devious vine dresser is possible, but I assumed from that snippet that the daughter just left. There's always been an issue of people leaving elderly or sick family because they no longer want to take care of them.

Important to note, it's very much an issue for the elderly and sick family. Not so much an issue for the person whose life gets derailed and cannot find love due to the overbearing demands of a less-than-grateful relative (which _might_ be whats happening here? very hard to know, but that seems to be what the person is demanding, that the woman abandon her love life and essentially live as her relative's slave).

Manipulative people copy commonly know (often stereotypical) stories as cover to whatever they're really doing.

Real stories, and manipulative fake stories , would be almost exactly the same, because one is copying the other. The manipulative stories are often slightly more realistic or interesting as the person telling it has had a second chance to refine it from the original version.

I'd guess it was way easier then to be one. All you have do to see these people in real life is go to a Latin American city or town square on a Saturday night and watch the old guys with money openly proposition girls who venture into town looking to hang out with kids their age.

But it also happens in America, Japan, China, India, etc. It's just way more visible and in the open and accepted as part of life in some places --i.e. police would not bat an eye.

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek here :)

As some of the other commentators pointed out, we don't know the full story, and it was also a different time.

>"“Nobody can love you, for she shapes you to her own will”.

So does Mother-in-law & Daughter-in-law fights !

But would you take her word for the truth? Also that's a good reminder for those nostalgic of the old days. Back when marriage was for life, abandoning your spouse was more common than you'd like to think.

There's human predators of every race, every gender and every occupation. This has been true as long as humans have been humans.

There are human predators that take advantage of people of skeptical minds, just as there are those who prey on the faithful. The human history of advancement and revolution has been an arms race of all of us vs. the great bamboozlers. As we refine our ability to detect them, they refine their ability to walk among us.

Maybe she's lying, maybe she's telling the truth. If she's lying, she and everyone affected are long dead. Doesn't change the fact she's describing a kind of human that has always existed.