Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

With respect to the Homeric Greeks, the family, although monogamian, was low in type. Husbands required chastity in their wives, which they sought to enforce by some degree of seclusion; but they did not admit the reciprocal obligation by which alone it could be permanently secured. Abundant evidence appears in the Homeric poems that woman had few rights men were bound to respect. Such female captives as were swept into their vessels by the Grecian chiefs, on their way to Troy, were appropriated to their passions without compunction and without restraint. It must be taken as a faithful picture of the times, whether the incidents narrated in the poems were real or fictitious. Although the persons were captives, it reflects the low estimate placed upon woman. Her dignity was unrecognized, and her personal rights were insecure. To appease the resentment of Achilles, Agamemnon proposed, in a council of the Grecian chiefs, to give to him, among other things, seven Lesbian women excelling in personal beauty, reserved for himself from the spoil of that city, Briseis herself to go among the number; and should Troy be taken, the further right to select twenty Trojan women, the fairest of all next to Argive Helen.[484] “Beauty and Booty” were the watchwords of the Heroic Age unblushingly avowed. The treatment of their female captives reflects the culture of the period with respect to women in general. Men having no regard for the parental, marital or personal rights of their enemies, could not have attained to any high conception of their own.

In describing the tent life of the unwedded Achilles, and of his friend Patroclus, Homer deemed it befitting the character and dignity of Achilles as a chief to show, that he slept in the recess of his well-constructed tent, and by his side lay a female, fair-cheeked Diomede, whom he had brought from Lesbos. And that Patroclus on the other side reclined, and by him also lay fair-waisted Iphis, whom noble Achilles gave him, having captured her at Scyros.[485] Such usages and customs on the part of unmarried as well as married men, cited approvingly by the great poet of the period, and sustained by public sentiment, tend to show that whatever of monogamy existed, was through an enforced constraint upon wives, while their husbands were not monogamists in the preponderating number of cases. Such a family has quite as many syndyasmian as monogamian characteristics.

The condition of woman in the Heroic Age is supposed to have been more favorable, and her position in the household more honorable than it was at the commencement of civilization, and even afterwards under their highest development. It may have been true in a far anterior period before descent was changed to the male line, but there seems to be little room for the conjecture at the time named. A great change for the better occurred, so far as the means and mode of life were concerned, but it served to render more conspicuous the real estimate placed upon her through the Later Period of barbarism.

Elsewhere attention has been called to the fact, that when descent was changed from the female line to the male, it operated injuriously upon the position and rights of the wife and mother. Her children were transferred from her own gens to that of her husband, and she forfeited her agnatic rights by her marriage without obtaining an equivalent. Before the change, the members of her own gens, in all probability, predominated in the household, which gave full force to the maternal bond, and made the woman rather more than the man the center of the family. After the change she stood alone in the household of her husband, isolated from her gentile kindred. It must have weakened the influence of the maternal bond, and have operated powerfully to lower her position and arrest her progress in the social scale. Among the prosperous classes, her condition of enforced seclusion, together with the avowed primary object of marriage, to beget children in lawful wedlock (παιδοποιεῖσθαι γνησίως), lead to the inference that her position was less favorable in the Heroic Age than in the subsequent period, concerning which we are much better informed.

From first to last among the Greeks there was a principle of egotism or studied selfishness at work among the males, tending to lessen the appreciation of woman, scarcely found among savages. It reveals itself in their plan of domestic life, which in the higher ranks secluded the wife to enforce an exclusive cohabitation, without admitting the reciprocal obligation on the part of her husband. It implies the existence of an antecedent conjugal system of the Turanian type, against which it was designed to guard. So powerfully had the usages of centuries stamped upon the minds of Grecian women a sense of their inferiority, that they did not recover from it to the latest period of Grecian ascendency. It was, perhaps, one of the sacrifices required of womankind to bring this portion of the human race out of the syndyasmian into the monogamian family. It still remains an enigma that a race, with endowments great enough to impress their mental life upon the world, should have remained essentially barbarian in their treatment of the female sex at the height of their civilization. Women were not treated with cruelty, nor with discourtesy within the range of the privileges allowed them; but their education was superficial, intercourse with the opposite sex was denied them, and their inferiority was inculcated as a principle, until it came to be accepted as a fact by the women themselves. The wife was not the companion and the equal of her husband, but stood to him in the relation of a daughter; thus denying the fundamental principle of monogamy, as the institution in its highest form must be understood. The wife is necessarily the equal of her husband in dignity, in personal rights and in social position. We may thus discover at what a price of experience and endurance this great institution of modern society has been won.

Our information is quite ample and specific with respect to the condition of Grecian women and the Grecian family during the historical period. Becker, with the marvelous research for which his works are distinguished, has collected the principal facts and presented them with clearness and force.[486] His statements, while they do not furnish a complete picture of the family of the historical period, are quite sufficient to indicate the great difference between the Grecian and the modern civilized family, and also to show the condition of the monogamian family in the early stages of its development.

Among the facts stated by Becker, there are two that deserve further notice: first, the declaration that the chief object of marriage was the procreation of children in lawful wedlock; and second, the seclusion of women to insure this result. The two are intimately connected, and throw some reflected light upon the previous condition from which they had emerged. In the first place, the passion of love was unknown among the barbarians. They are below the sentiment, which is the offspring of civilization and superadded refinement. The Greeks in general, as their marriage customs show, had not attained to a knowledge of this passion, although there were, of course, numerous exceptions. Physical worth, in Grecian estimation, was the measure of all the excellences of which the female sex were capable. Marriage, therefore, was not grounded upon sentiment, but upon necessity and duty. These considerations are those which governed the Iroquois and the Aztecs; in fact they originated in barbarism, and reveal the anterior barbarous condition of the ancestors of the Grecian tribes. It seems strange that they were sufficient to answer the Greek ideal of the family relation in the midst of Grecian civilization. The growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children was, in reality, the moving power which brought in monogamy to insure legitimate heirs, and to limit their number to the actual progeny of the married pair. A knowledge of the paternity of children had begun to be realized under the syndyasmian family, from which the Grecian form was evidently derived, but it had not attained the requisite degree of certainty because of the survival of some portion of the ancient jura conjugialia. It explains the new usage which made its appearance in the Upper Status of barbarism; namely, the seclusion of wives. An implication to this effect arises from the circumstance that a necessity for the seclusion of the wife must have existed at the time, and which seems to have been so formidable that the plan of domestic life among the civilized Greeks was, in reality, a system of female confinement and restraint. Although the particulars cited relate more especially to the family among the prosperous classes, the spirit it evinces was doubtless general.

Turning next to the Roman family, the condition of woman is more favorable, but her subordination the same.

She was treated with respect in Rome as in Athens, but in the Roman family her influence and authority were greater. As mater familias she was mistress of the family. She went into the streets freely without restraint on the part of her husband, and frequented with the men the theaters and festive banquets. In the house she was not confined to particular apartments, neither was she excluded from the table of the men. The absence of the worst restrictions placed upon Grecian females was favorable to the growth of a sense of personal dignity and of independence among Roman women. Plutarch remarks that after the peace with the Sabines, effected through the intervention of the Sabine women, many honorable privileges were conferred upon them; the men were to give them the way when they met on the street; they were not to utter a vulgar word in the presence of females, nor appear nude before them.[487] Marriage, however, placed the wife in the power of her husband (in manum viri); the notion that she must remain under power following, by an apparent necessity, her emancipation by her marriage from paternal power. The husband treated his wife as his daughter, and not as his equal. Moreover, he had the power of correction, and of life and death in case of adultery; but the exercise of this last power seems to have been subject to the concurrence of the council of her gens.

Unlike other people, the Romans possessed three forms of marriage. All alike placed the wife in the hand of her husband, and recognized as the chief end of marriage the procreation of children in lawful wedlock (liberorum querendorum causa).[488] These forms (confarreatio, coëmptio, and usus) lasted through the Republic, but fell out under the Empire, when a fourth form, the free marriage, was generally adopted, because it did not place the wife in the power of her husband. Divorce, from the earliest period, was at the option of the parties, a characteristic of the syndyasmian family, and transmitted probably from that source. They rarely occurred, however, until near the close of the Republic.[489]