Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, January (2009)
Abstract
To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)).
Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.
Walter Scheidel
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, January (2009)
Abstract
To a modern western audience, the fact that ancient Greeks and Romans were not supposed to be married to more than one person at any given time, nor even to cohabit with others alongside legal spouses, must seem perfectly ‘normal’. This may explain why this practice has received hardly any attention from historians of the classical world. Yet from a global, cross-cultural perspective, there is nothing ‘normal’ or unremarkable about this. Instead, until very recently, polygynous arrangements of marriage or cohabitation were the norm in world history, and strict monogamy remained an exception. Barely one in six of the 1,195 societies surveyed in the largest anthropological dataset have been classified as ‘monogamous’, while polygyny was frequently considered the preferred choice even if it failed to be common in practice (Gray (1998) 89-90, with Clark (1998)).
Smaller samples of better documented societies convey a similar picture, and while ‘monogamy’ is observed in a small proportion of all cases (16-20% in samples of 348 and 862 systems: Murdock (1967); Burton et al. (1996)), due to their failure to distinguish between rare instances of polygamy and its formal prohibition these surveys tend to overestimate the actual incidence of strictly monogamous rules. In fact, although the nature of the evidence does not allow us to rule out the existence of strictly monogamous systems prior to the first millennium BCE, the earliest unequivocal documentation originates from the archaic Greek and early Roman periods. Thus, even though Greeks and Romans need not have been the first cultures to prescribe monogamy, these are the earliest securely attested cases and, moreover, established a paradigm for subsequent periods that eventually attained global dominance. In this sense, Greco-Roman monogamy may well be the single most important phenomenon of ancient history that has remained widely unrecognized. What is more, the global positive correlation between patricentric kinship systems and polygyny (Burton et al. (1996) 93-4) renders the emergence of prescriptive monogamy in the patricentric societies of Greece and Rome even more remarkable.
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