- Like I said, ancient Rome was very anti-Judaic/Jewish, they prohibited polygamy in response against Judaism.
- Firstly, in basically all cultures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, the vast majority of men were de facto monogamous in the sense of having only one legal wife at a time. Although it was socially acceptable in many of those cultures for a man to have more than one wife at a time, in practice, the vast majority of men could not afford to take more than one wife because wives and the offspring they were expected to produce were enormously expensive. Thus, in practice, in those cultures, the vast majority of men had only one wife and only the very wealthy could really afford to have more than that.
- Secondly, ancient Greek and Roman men were only “monogamous” in the sense that a man could only have one legal wife at a time; it was widely accepted (and even to some degree socially expected) that a free man would have sexual relations with enslaved people under his ownership (both female and male), with prostitutes (both female and male), and/or with freeborn adolescent boys. (In Classical Athens, the law nominally prohibited a man from sexually penetrating a boy of the citizen class, but it was considered acceptable for a man to engage in intercrural intercourse with a citizen boy and the law against penetration was almost certainly routinely ignored entirely.) By sharp contrast, all Greek and Roman wives were effectively considered the property of their husbands; they were expected to remain absolutely loyal to their husbands and never have any sexual relations of any kind with any man other than their husband under any circumstances. The Athenian orator Apollodoros summarizes the mainstream Greek ideology of marriage in his speech Against Neaira (Dem. 59), which he most likely delivered in around the year 342 BCE or thereabouts. He says in section 122:
- “τὸ γὰρ συνοικεῖν τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν, ὃς ἂν παιδοποιῆται καὶ εἰσάγῃ εἴς τε τοὺς φράτερας καὶ δημότας τοὺς υἱεῖς, καὶ τὰς θυγατέρας ἐκδιδῷ ὡς αὑτοῦ οὔσας τοῖς ἀνδράσιν. τὰς μὲν γὰρ ἑταίρας ἡδονῆς ἕνεκ᾽ ἔχομεν, τὰς δὲ παλλακὰς τῆς καθ᾽ ἡμέραν θεραπείας τοῦ σώματος, τὰς δὲ γυναῖκας τοῦ παιδοποιεῖσθαι γνησίως καὶ τῶν ἔνδον φύλακα πιστὴν ἔχειν.”
- Thus, it was completely normal and socially accepted for a Greek man to have sexual relations with women other than his lawful wife. In the view of elite male Greek writers, the two main factors that separated wives from prostitutes and enslaved concubines were (firstly) that the children a wife bore were legally her husband’s and could inherit his citizenship and (secondly) that wives were delegated the responsibility of managing their husbands’ households on their behalf.
- Under the Romans, polygamy was legal until the Christians gained control in the reign of Constantine. The first Roman law forbidding polygamy was by that emperor made in 320 AD, stating: “No married man may have a concubine during the existence of his marriage.” In this law the term “concubine” refers to wife by usus, not to a slave. Usus normally required a written legal contract and the wife was a legal, freeborn wife. In Roman society a usus wife was just as legal as the primary wife. Originally, Romans had several different grades of wife and it was common for wealthy men to have all grades. This gradually devolved into having a primary wife and various usus wives. This does not include sex with slaves who were not considered any kind of wife. Roman law provided for what we now call “common law” wives, meaning automatic usus status even without a contract if the woman slept in the man’s house for over one year. The Twelve Tables specifically states the terms of this law as follows: “If a wife should sleep for three nights in a year out of her husband’s house, she should not be subject to his paternal power.”
- The Oxford biological anthropologist, Dr Laura Fortunato, writes that: The phylogenetic comparative analysis of marriage strategies across societies speaking [Indo-European] languages provides evidence in support of [Proto-Indo-European] monogamy … More generally, these reconstructions push the origin of monogamous marriage into prehistory, well beyond the earliest instances documented in the historical record. This implies that the archaeological and genetic evidence for the nuclear family in prehistoric populations may reflect a monogamous marriage strategy.
- Fortunato, Laura. “Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European-Speaking Societies: Monogamy and Polygyny.” Human Biology 83.1 (2011): 87-105.
- By the historical period, by contrast, [Socially Imposed Universal Monogamy] was firmly established as the only legitimate marriage system [in Greece]: polygamy was considered a barbarian custom or a mark of tyranny and monogamy was regarded as quintessentially “Greek” … There is no sign of an early polygamous tradition in Rome.
- Scheidel, Walter. “A Peculiar Institution? Greco–Roman Monogamy in Global Context.” The History of the Family 14.3 (2009): 280-291.
- Athens under Solon the Lawmaker did not exactly outlaw polygamy per se (this was probably already illegal or socially unacceptable, excepting as concubines). Rather, it established the concept of legitimacy by excluding bastard children from the legitimate family and inheritance. [A]s a legally sanctioned reproductive institution, the laws redefined the conjugal family as the sole legitimate family form … after the time of Solon’s laws the bastard was not considered a full member of the father’s household, if he or she was a member at all.
- Lape, Susan. “Solon and the Institution of the” Democratic” Family Form.” Classical Journal (2002): 117-139.
Leave a Reply