4 Greek Monogamy and Polygyny

In the historical period, Greeks were expected to marry monogamously. Only “barbarians” did otherwise: as Euripides put it, “we count it as shame that over two wives one man hold wedlock’s reins” (Andromache 215). Exclusive legitimate reproduction and physical co-residence were the defining characteristics of Greek monogamy. In Classical Athens, in any case, only wives could bear legitimate children. This was the outcome of an earlier process of tightening rules that had enabled male citizens to have extra-marital children recognized as legitimate offspring (Lape (2002/2003)). Once firmly in place, monogamous norms were only relaxed in times of serious crisis: near the end of the Peloponnesian War, massive male casualties justified a temporary exception that allowed men to father legitimate offspring with one woman other than their own wife (Ogden (1996) 72–75). However, less democratic systems may have been more permissive: Aristotle’s references to the enfranchisement of citizen-slave offspring in other poleis may be relevant here (Politics 3.1278a25–34, 6.1319b6–11).

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Greek monogamy was geographically narrowly circumscribed. Not only was bigamy attributed to the Thracians and polygamy common in the ruling class of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, even the Hellenized Macedonian rulers and their associates took multiple wives (Ogden (1999), and above, Chapter 5). Greeks abroad, however, did not necessarily adopt more relaxed customs: marriage contracts from Ptolemaic Egypt prohibit concubinage for Greek husbands, not to mention polygamy. Prescriptive monogamy remained a defining feature of “being Greek.”

5 Roman Monogamy and Polygyny

In the historical period, Roman rules envisioned monogamy in comparable terms. From a legal perspective, formal polygamy was impossible given that a new marriage would have voided an existing one. Modern scholars are divided over the question whether concubinage was feasible within (rather than as an alternative to) Roman marriage (Friedl (1996) 214–15). Our sources do not permit certainty until Justinian affirmed the illegal nature of concurrent concubinage in the sixth century CE, albeit as a putatively “ancient law” (CJ 7.15.3.2). The conventional expectation was certainly that concubinage would serve as an alternative rather than a supplement to marriage, and occasional allegations to contrary behavior need not have been more than slander (Friedl (1996) 218–20). The presence of parallel relationships among soldiers remains a possibility but the evidence is ambiguous (Friedl (1996) 256–57; Phang (2001) 412–13).

Just as in Greece, however, effectively polygynous relationships with (a man’s own) slaves were not prohibited. Married men’s sexual relations with slaves did not legally count as adultery. The Roman literary tradition is rife with allusions to sex with slaves (for example, Garrido-Hory (1981); Kolendo (1981)), a notion that is well illustrated by the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus’ criticism of a “man who has relations with his own slave girl, a thing that some people consider quite without blame” (fragment 12). Several centuries later the Christian writer Salvian made the same point when he claimed that the wealthy universally behaved “like the husbands of their slave girls” (Government of God 7.4). More mundanely, slaves who were the illegitimate children of their owners (filii naturales) could be manumitted before they reached the standard legal-age threshold of 30 years (Gaius, Institutes 1.19), and blood ties between owners and slaves are repeatedly referenced in legal cases (Rawson (1989) 23–29). Adoption of such offspring was legally feasible upon manumission but entirely optional, and eventually subject to restrictions (Gardner (1998) 182–83). Also as in Greece, sex with domestic slaves was supplemented by unsanctioned access to (often servile) prostitutes.

Although Roman emperors were technically subject to the same marriage rules as the general citizenry, their alleged habits of sexual predation exercised the imagination of contemporaneous historians and biographers (Betzig (1992a); Scheidel (2009b) 299–301). Notwithstanding the possibility of very considerable exaggeration, such behavior would be fully in line with royal polygyny in other early empires, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that critics emphasized this aspect of imperial (mis)conduct.

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8 The Afterlife of Greco-Roman Monogamy

As both the notion of civic rights and the institution of chattel slavery declined in the Greco-Roman world of the later Roman Empire, Christianity maintained and reinforced monogamous norms. The canonical New Testament tradition has Jesus take sides in Jewish debates about the propriety of divorce in a way that implies rejection of any nonmonogamous practices (Matthew 19:3–12; Mark 10:2–12; Brewer (2000) 89–100). The roughly contemporaneous Qumran movement likewise opposed polygamy (Brewer (2000) 80–82). Pauline doctrine, however, fails explicitly to address this issue (Brewer (2000) 104). Later Church Fathers saw fit to explain away Old Testament polygamy as motivated by God’s command to populate the world, an expansion that was no longer necessary or desirable (for example, Clark (1986) 147). However, monogamy per se does not play a central role in early Christian writings, and the fact that Augustine labeled it a “Roman custom” (On the Good of Marriage 7) indicates that Christianity may simply have appropriated it as an element of mainstream Greco-Roman culture.

Prescriptive monogamy came under pressure as the Roman Empire unraveled: powerful neighbors and conquerors, from Zoroastrian Iranians and Islamic Arabs to nominally or not at all Christian Germans and later Slavs, Norse, and steppe populations, did not subscribe to comparable marital norms. In the East, the Sasanid Empire with its polygamous elite (Hjerrild (2003)) was replaced by Islamic polities. The Qur’an prefers monogamy and tolerates plural marriage only if it is feasible and serves the interests of individuals who would not otherwise be provided for: “If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with them [i.e., as wives], then only one” (Qur’an 4.3). Post-Roman Germanic practices are less well documented but polygamy and parallel concubinage did occur; only one of the several Germanic Roman-style law codes outlawed polygamy (Brundage (1987) 128–33). Thus, Germanic arrangements do not appear to have differed greatly from the polygynous dealings recorded in the early medieval Irish tradition (Bitel (2002) 180–81, 184; cf. Ross (1985) ).

Under these circumstances, Greco-Roman-style prescriptive monogamy found itself in a precarious position, and its eventual expansion as a Christian institution was by no means a foregone conclusion. The unfolding of this drawn-out process is well beyond the remit of this chapter. Suffice it to say that the very considerable normative power of monogamy within Christianity is highlighted by the fact that sectarian polygamy – among the Anabaptists of Münster in the early sixteenth century and the first generations of the Mormons – remained a sporadic fringe phenomenon. In recent centuries, Western-style prescriptive monogamy achieved global reach through demic diffusion and acculturation, with the areas least affected by European influence (the Middle East and tropical Africa) showing the greatest resilience of polygamous preference. These developments can ultimately be traced back to Greek and Roman conventions and form an element of our Greco-Roman heritage that deserves a far more prominent status in our historical consciousness than it has so far achieved.