III. Various Forms of Concubinage.
Between animal love, that can be tasted with the prostitute, and the noblest monogamic union, there is a wide space, which the concubinate has filled. Legal concubinage or the concubinate, admitted and practised, as we shall see, in so many countries, is a sort of free marriage, tolerated by custom, recognised by law, and co-existing by the side of monogamic marriage, the rigour of which it palliates. It was at first a blending of polygamy with monogamy, and then, undergoing itself an evolution analogous to that which has caused the adoption by degrees of legal monogamy among nearly all civilised peoples, it ended by becoming in its turn monogamic in ancient Rome. I will briefly retrace its ethnographical history.
In its primitive phase, still very confused, the concubinate has been simply the conjugal appropriation of slaves, especially of women captured after a victory. These were part of the rights of the victor; the captives were considered as booty, and shared in the same way. We have already seen in Deuteronomy that Moses authorises this barbarous practice, and that it was habitual also among the primitive Arabs. The Homeric warriors did the same, as various passages of the Iliad and Odyssey prove.
I will quote a few of them. To begin with, we find the old priest Chryses comes to offer Agamemnon a rich ransom for his daughter, and receives from the king of kings the brutal reply—“I will not set your daughter free: old age shall find her in my dwelling at Argos, far from her native land, weaving linen and sharing my bed. Go, then, and provoke me not.”[465]
Thersites, speaking to Agamemnon, is still more explicit—“Son of Atreus, what more dost thou require? What wilt thou? Thy tents are full of brass and of many most beautiful women, that we give first to thee, we, Acheans, when we take a town.”[466] Elsewhere, Achilles, speaking of his beloved Briseis, of whom he had been robbed, cries—“Why have the Atreides led hither this vast army? Is it not for the sake of the dark-haired Helen? Are they, then, the only men who love their wives? Every wise and good man cherishes and loves his wife. And I also loved Briseis from my heart, although she was a captive.”[467]
And, a little further on, he makes a clear distinction between the slave concubine and the legitimate wife, swearing never to accept as wife a daughter of Agamemnon.
In the Odyssey, when Ulysses enters unrecognised his own house, and sees pass before him in the vestibule his female slaves, laughing and joyous as they go to play with the suitors, his feelings are not merely those of a lawful proprietor who is offended, but of a jealous man whose harem has been violated. At first he is tempted to kill these women, which he actually does a little later, and he hears “his heart cry out in his bosom, as a bitch, turning around her young ones, barks at a stranger and tries to bite him.”[468]
But such customs have prevailed here and there up to modern times. In 1548, in Peru, when Pedro de la Gasca had defeated the party of Pizarro, he distributed amongst his followers the widows of the colonists who were killed.
At Asterabad, after a small local revolt, Hanway saw the Persian magistrates sell fifty women to the soldiers.
In Livonia, after the taking of Narva, Peter the Great coolly sold to the boyars the wives of the inhabitants.[469] Bruce tells us also that in Abyssinia the victors habitually take possession of the wives of the vanquished.[470]