Patriliny in Sparta: A City Under Pressure

All scholars would agree that the ancient Spartans practiced patriliny. But what is patriliny?

A patrilinear kinship system is one in which all trace their descent through males (and males only) to a common male ancestor, often fictitious.(1) Patriliny is often associated with patrilocality. Patrilocality is the practice of bringing in wives from a different patriline to live in the home of the groom’s father and, also, moving daughters out on the occasion of their marriages into the residence of some other patriline. Because of incest rules sisters cannot be used to reproduce the line and so must be shipped away into another patriline. (There are exogamy rules which give some shape to this practice.) Sisters are – from the kinship point of view – ‘good for nothing’. Therefore the social roles in such a system are son, father, husband, and brother for males as well as wife and mother for females. The roles of daughter and sister can be weakened in such a society.

A patriline might best be conceived of as a band of males. This male group is required to be cohesive for some socially important work – it might be agriculture, hunting, or warfare – the cohesiveness is reinforced by kinship. It is the necessity for the male band that comes first – this cemented by patrilocality. The patrilinear practice follows from this. It does not precede it. In such an arrangement definite ties to the kinship line are very important and every man is concerned that he is the genitor of his own sons. Legitimacy is highly valued in most patrilines and so adultery by one’s wife in such a society is ordinarily a serious offence. The band wants to be bound by the recognized kinship of its own members and not to some other patrilines bastards. In a matriline, by contrast, it only matters that one is the child of one’s mother – the identity of one’s father is nowhere near as crucial. In matrilines, by contrast, marital ties are often attenuated and women are often allowed many lovers.

The great weakness of unilinear societies of whichever type is that some generation may not produce children of the desired gender. To that we may add the danger that children of the required gender are killed off in some particular generation. Those two factors, needed gender child not being born at all or killed off before having a chance to breed, may work together in a generation or two to severely attenuate a uniline’s chance to continue itself. In such a circumstance a society must resort to some silly subterfuge for continuing the kinship or, given pressures of sufficient intensity, may switch to a different system of reckoning kinship altogether.

The society of ancient Sparta, patrilinear or not, breaks the rules of patriliny in important ways.

First it’s curious that so much of Spartan marriage practice is characteristic of matrilines. Plutarch tells us:

“For in the first place, Lycurgus did not regard sons as the peculiar property of their fathers, but rather as the common property of the city [polis], and therefore would not have his citizens spring from random parentage, but from the best there was”(2)

This silly explanation may contain a grain of truth.  First of all it couldn’t possibly matter what Lycurgus (real or not, king or not) ‘considered’.  But if sons were not thought of as the property of their fathers then whose property were they?  In a traditional society such as Sparta of the 8^th(?) century BC they would not be the property of the city, a concept of ownership which could not have existed at that time.  The only possible answer is that they are the property of their kin.  Now let’s rephrase  Plutarch’s words in the light of what we have said and let’s also strip out the anachronistic rationalizing and eugenic encrustations with which Plutarch has larded the discussion(3).  By doing that we have this:

“… sons were not regarded as the peculiar property of their fathers, but rather as the … property of [their kin]…”

Now we get at the gravamen of the statement. It suggests that, from the point of view of Spartan tradition, children (sons and daughters) were less tied to their fathers than the author (Plutarch) was accustomed to seeing among other Greeks. And here I think we need to add if the father’s right is diminished then that suggests that the mother’s right is enhanced. In a patriline how could the mother’s relationship (from the kinship point of view) to the child possibly be counted as more important than the relationship of the child to the father? How could this make sense?

I do not pretend to know whether this was the real state of affairs in Sparta but, yes, it could make sense. Sparta was a society in which men spent most of their lives outside the house. The resulting house composition was overwhelmingly female (a previous post). And at least one of the pressures we named, killing off of the descent gender (males), was present in that society.

This is one example of several environmental pressures that were slowly building up on the Spartan patrilines.

More on this topic in my next post.

(This blog post was much influenced by Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, CUP, 1984. I trust that I have reproduced his definitions accurately but any errors are mine.)

NOTES:
(1) I suspect that all Greeks were patrilinear. The Lycians were matrilineal, according to Herodotus (I, 173) and he gives there a classic account of a typical matrilineal society. He is wrong when he says that matrilinearity is observed in no other place but his saying it gives me confidence in thinking that all the Greeks reckoned descent in patrilinear fashion. The Lycians were not a purely Greek society but were a mixed group of native Luwian speakers and Greeks who settled there later.

(2) Plutarch.  “Lycurgus”, 15. In Richard J. Talbert, Plutarch on Sparta, Penguin, 1988, 26.  (This citation has been corrected and rewritten since originally published.)

(3) This little statement is a great example of the rationalizing and ethicizing tendencies of so many Greek authors. We do not look to the ancient Greek writers for ethnographic sensitivity.

Achaeans: the Fierce People. Part II.

“As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.”
Traditional

I have recently been reading John Gottschall’s The Rape of Troy, (Cambridge, 2008).

(I have found a version of the book online and it is to this version that I refer.  I learn that this is a Russian piracy site and for that reason I do not provide a link to it.  You may prefer to buy the book here.  You can rent the Kindle version for $10.65)

In my last post I also wrote about Chagnon’s Noble Savages and I continue to refer to it here and use it as a corrective to Gottschall.

I mentioned Gottschall’s work in my last post and I strongly recommend it to all my readers.  It seems incredible that this outsider to classical studies (he is a literary critic) should have written something so new and refreshing about the Homeric epics but, perhaps, it takes an outsider to accomplish something paradigm-shaking.  The purpose of his book is to examine the real reasons for Homeric war in light of the anthropological evidence.  Because evolutionary psychology and sociobiological findings are so new we can probably look forward to many new insights about Homer and the anthropology of the Classical period and, if this work is any evidence, we can all be very optimistic about what is to come.

Sarcophagus depicting scenes from the life of Achilles.  Here Achilles with the body of Hector. Marble. Roman, from Attica, Greece. Getty Villa.   A.D. 180-220. Courtesy, Squinchpix.com

Gottschall’s argument about the Homeric world and the concomitant violence of that world can be summarized in this way.  Since male reproductive effort is minimal (the ‘sperm is cheap’ argument) and female reproductive effort requires major biological commitment (the ‘eggs are expensive’ argument)  women are choosy about their potential mates.  Because Homeric society is so violent  women are only going to choose the potential mate which can protect them and their children; they are going to choose men who are strong and ruthless – even cruel.   At the same time, again because Homeric society is so violent, parents probably show a preferential tendency towards male children.  That means, Gottschall presumes, that there is a tendency towards early female mortality (EFM or female infanticide).  EFM and that, along with polygyny (multiple wives taken by the more important men), distorts the sex ratio towards males.   But most males want female mates in this world.  Because of the imbalance between the genders wars are fought primarily over women and the result is that, Homeric society becomes even more competitive, warlike, and violent.  No family or community can afford to stop being warlike because they cannot count on others doing the same.  This is his argument about the people in Homeric society being caught in the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’.  Throughout Gottschall exhibits a deft hand with both classical philology and the latest findings in ethnography and anthropology.

While I stand in amazement at Gottschall’s achievement I find some problems with his exposition.

Gottschall seems not to distinguish clearly that there are two ways in which men find wives in Homer’s world and this confusion impedes his argument.  The first way to find a mate is through legitimately contracted marriages with other kinship lines.  The second is through the seizure of other women in raiding or in war. 

But in the Homeric world, whether marriage is created by agreement or through rapine,  women don’t choose their mates. His ‘eggs are expensive/sperm not’ argument makes no sense in the way in which he employs it.

Nor does his female infanticide argument make sense in respect to marriages made through agreement with other kinship lines.   In such a society females are more valuable than Gottschall is prepared to allow.  (I believe that his lack of anthropological training has played him false on this point.) 

Let’s start by trying to improve, not destroy, Gottschall’s argument.  Gottschall’s general statements about egg and sperm areundoubtedly true but there’s another way to state these ideas which makes for a more convincing argument.  ‘Female eggs are expensive’ is a restatement of the idea that women tend to have about the same number of children over a lifetime.  In a Homeric society (there are no meaningful numbers) let’s say that this is six children with a s.d. of 2.  That means that 68% of women will have between 4 and 8 children.  My numbers are notional and only intended to motivate the argument. 

‘Sperm is cheap’ means that men can have a very large number of children if they’re given access to enough women.  Chagnon’s story of the Yanomamo man, Shinbone, illustrates this.  (Chagnon, Noble Savages, 328, 330 et passim)   Shinbone, through multiple wives, had 20 sons and 23 daughters.  These 20 sons had 62 sons and 58 daughters.  In the next generation these 62 grand-sons of Shinbone had 57 more sons.  These large numbers of descendants become united in times of combat through the patrilineal descent group.   Gottschall tends to use the word ‘patrilocal’ when he means ‘patrilineal’ and this confuses his thinking on this point.  As here on 132: “Patrilocality, … , [was an adaptation] designed to ensure that brothers and sons stuck together, maximizing the … fighting force…”.  But Gottschall surely means ‘patrilineal’ here.  ‘Patrilocal’ is an idea about marriage behavior; ‘patrilineal’ is an idea about kinship.  It means ‘tracing descent exclusively through males from a founding male ancestor’, e.g. someone like Shinbone.  It is the patrilinealdescent group (PDG) which becomes the prima facie war band of the Homeric community.  These males stick together and fight together because they are united by kinship; descent from a common male ancestor.  Not only is the kinship band an invaluable ally in capturing other women but also (and ignored by Gottschall) ones own kinship band furnishes the daughters which can be traded away to members of other PDG for wives which are obtained through agreement.  Chagnon describes how it often occurs that one patrilineal descent group forms a symbiotic relationship with another PDG  when he describes the ‘dual organization’ of PDGs in Noble Savages, 322.  He shows how the daughters of the first PDG become the wives of the young males in the second and, reciprocally, how the daughters of the second become the wives of the young males in the first.  In other words two PDG can go for a long period furnishing wives to each other.   But, in addition to peacefully obtained wives, our heroes in the Homeric world, as well as in the Orinoco river valley, love sex, pure and simple.  In order to have more sex (and more children to strengthen their own kinship group) they raid other groups for female captives.  These female captives then become polygynous mates and, in the course of events, bear children to their captors.

This brings us back to female infanticide.  Even though there is a complete lack of evidence for it I do not deny that female infanticide most probably occurred in the Homeric world; what I deny that it is an important factor in sex-ratio imbalances in that world.  Based on ethnographic research,  there are very good reasons to think that the situation in that world, with respect to EFM, was the reverse of what Gottschall supposes it to have been.  Gottschall then employs his ‘certainty’ about EFM as here:  “… parental manipulation of juvenile sex ratios in favor of male offspring, either through active infanticide by exposure or more ‘‘passive’’ means. However, this leaves an important question unanswered. Why would Homeric parents bias investment in favor of sons?” (130)

But Gottschall has begged the question because he has not shown that Homeric parents do bias parental investment in favor of sons.  He has just assumed that they do along with his assumption, undocumented and undocumentable, that EFM must have been the case.

What predisposes me against his idea is that it’s often the case that a young man in one PDG must go without a wife if he has no sister to trade to another PDG in exchange for one.  It would not be wise to sacrifice young females through infanticide because that could mean that her brother, either real or potential, might go without a wife and that wouldn’t be optimal from the standpoint of PDG strength. (Chagnon, Noble Savages, 322 ff.)  In my view polygyny is enough to explain the continuing conflicts of young men over obtaining young women and we shouldn’t assume anything more until we have proof. 

The most thought-provoking part of Gottschall’s exposition is in his final chapter in which he attempts to show, first, that the violence, cruelty and general ill-fatedness of the Iliad is really the same as that of the Odyssey, contra many Homeric critics.

Secondly he attempts to explain the general pessimism of these two epics, the feeling of being trapped in never-ending cycle of war and retribution, by saying that the predicament of the Homeric Greeks is like that of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.  This is a well-known result from Game Theory in which two prisoners, acting singly, will always generate the worst possible outcome for both, even though if they acted together they would minimize their punishment.  It is this inability of the Homeric Greek communities to ‘act together’ that dooms them to never-ending violence.  No Greek community dares to be less violent than its neighbors.

I think that Gottschall misses an important opportunity here.  In Noble Savages (311-12) Chagnon develops a compelling theory (confirmed by his and others’ field research) showing how communities can become larger and remain internally peaceful through development of more complex social institutions.  It is this, in fact, which forms the conceptual core of Noble Savages and its most compelling exposition.  At first communities, according to Chagnon, fission under the pressure of internal disagreements.  This is not optimal because smaller communities are more vulnerable to raids.  A village can be held together even though there is internal strife if the headman becomes particularly cruel and manipulative; a village that would otherwise fission is now held together.  As bad as it sounds this is adaptive.  Sometimes, however, villages are hemmed in by other villages.  Under the pressure of internal discord their inhabitants can neither move nor fission.  Such a village is compelled to get larger in place.  Under this external pressure such a village can develop mechanisms of dispute resolution that depend on more than just simple fissioning or the blows of a headman.  Developing such institutions is highly adaptive; now communities can become larger and even absorb other communities into an ever-growing polity.  Something similar happened in the Greek world and it is this way forward that we miss in Gottschall.   His ignoring this point keeps his book in the realm of literary criticism and prevents it from being a genuine historical investigation.   

I, at least, can overlook this shortcoming.  What classical studies has always needed is a true anthropology of the Greeks and the Romans.  Gottschall shows us one way that this can be done and I congratulate him on his achievement.  His is one of those books which, when we’ve read it, our world is completely different afterwards.