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 8th(?) 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.
squinches 