T. R. Fehrenbach (San Antonio Express-News) has a column (part one of two) on marriage, tied to current events:
Due to an upcoming election, the subject of marriage is much in the news.
No, this ain't about the sanctity of wedlock or a diatribe against abominations. I just feel like discussing heterosexual bondage this Sunday, a practice that goes back beyond history to the seminal cultures of our Western world.
We know that some form of marriage between men and women emerged in human societies long before government or the state evolved. (Of course, once you create the state, it tries to get into every act.) All primitive peoples learned the necessity for exogamous mating — the oldest universal taboo is incest — and about consanguinity and descent.
The Indo-European peoples developed customs of private property, aristocracy and kingship and forms of slavery or serfdom thousands of years before they entered Europe. Stone-age males may have been inspired between the ages of 18 and 24 to impregnate every female in reach (and the female of the species is capable of perpetual heat), but institutions had to develop to trace parentage and heirship. The earliest Greeks placed great emphasis on the legitimacy of offspring, and such attitudes only faded in the last century.
Unlike many other human cultures, the early European did not recognize children begotten of concubines, slaves or prostitutes as equal or entitled to heirship. Pericles, Athens' leading statesman, had enormous difficulty getting citizenship for a child by a non-Athenian mistress after his last legitimate son died. The major purpose of marriage in the Greek civilization was to legitimize children.
An Athenian marriage ceremony (not celebration) between father or guardian and suitor went something like this:
I give this woman for the procreation of legitimate children.
I accept.
Here is (sum of money, dowry).
I'm happy with that.This transaction sealed, if not consummated, the marriage.
Some jurists held that a marriage was not legal unless a dowry was paid. This is another widespread usage that lasted until recently in Mediterranean lands. Note that nothing was said about love, and the girl had no say in the matter. Love and choice are very modern additions, even in our own culture.
Of course, Greeks were not ignorant of love between sexes and same sexes; their poetry is full of same. A girl's glance made a man "melt inside" 2,500 years ago (as a poet in Sparta wrote). Sappho of Lesbos was a girl with style. However, the Greco-Roman world did not consider that love and marriage were inseparable; they did have one without the other.
A surviving summation in an Athenian court of law says: "We have call girls (hetairai, if you prefer another translation) for our pleasure, mistresses for the refreshment of our bodies, and wives to bear legitimate children and keep our house."
This tells a lot about most ancient societies. Wives were expected to be chaste and good housekeepers and had special status as such. If a wife and husband were fond of each other, it was a gift from the gods. But nothing indicates that Homer's Penelope was unusual except in degree. The institution of marriage was respected — after all, the Trojan war started over wife-stealing. Greek wives were protected and sequestered, whether they liked it or not.
Roman society was quite different. The early empire afforded women an entirely new sexual independence, together with the right to own and inherit property. (Roman ladies had more freedom than British until 1870.) Marriages were still arranged, but girls could simply say "no," which drove poets wild. Horace kept his cool because he stuck with slave girls and the demi-monde. Ovid fell for society girls and went nuts. By all accounts, upper-class women enjoyed much freedom, which seems to have led to a great deal of debauchery, adultery and divorce. Caesar Augustus (aging prudishly) made laws to encourage marriage, children and punish adultery.
By all accounts, such laws had little effect.
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