Adultery in Sparta. A City Under Pressure, II.

In my last blog post I said that the ancient Spartans like all Greeks of that time were patrilinear; that is, that they traced descent exclusively through the male line. And I suggested that this was preceded by patrilocality which we know that they also practiced. But I also suggested that there appear to be peculiar matrilinear characteristics in what we are told of Spartan married life. In support of this point I mentioned Plutarch’s cryptic remark about children not being the property of the father. This is a behavior usually found among matrilineal societies.

More, I said that adultery was an extremely serious matter in patrilineal systems but that this appears not to have been the case among the Spartans. In Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution we read the following:

“He (Lycurgus) observed, however, that where an old man happened to have a young wife, he tended to keep a very jealous watch on her. So he planned to prevent this too, by arranging that for the production of children the elderly husband should introduce to his wife any man whose physique and personality he admired. Further, should a man not wish to be married, but still be eager to have remarkable children, Lycurgus also made it lawful for him to have children by any fertile and well-bred woman who came to his attention, subject to her husband’s consent.”(1)

The question that concerns us is to what lineage (genos) did a child belong when born as a result of such a liaison? There are three possibilities. The woman is born into genos X, she marries into genos Y (exogamous), and has a sexual encounter with a man in genos Z. To which genos does the child belong?

In commenting on this passage Lipka says this:

“The children of the man (for the sake of clarity he may be termed [A]) who had asked another man (termed [B]) for his wife to beget children, remained in the oikos of the former (i.e. [A]). He could recognize them or refuse recognition. One may suggest that in the latter case the physical father [B] would have the right of adoption. At any rate, children begotten in this way would be uterine siblings of the same genos (i.e. the genos of their mother) in relation to already existing sons of either man …”(2)

Compare this to Herodotus’ description of the matrilineal practice of the Lycians:

“…they have one unique custom of their own which is not observed among any other people. They name themselves after their mothers and not their fathers. If one person asks another who he is, he will recite his maternal lineage, recounting his mother and grandmother and the mothers before her. And if a native free woman has children by a slave, their children are considered legitimate; but if a native free man has a foreign wife or concubine, their children have no civic status or civic rights.” (3)

The point of comparison is that the children in both schemes inherit the status (in this case kinship rights) of their mothers. Against my argument it may be urged that this entire process in Sparta is under the control of the husband and that the wife, considered as merely the resting place in which the male seed develops, has nothing to do with it. But the similarity remains. The wife takes a lover, becomes pregnant, and her child is a fully legitimate member of her kinship – very different from the usual practice in patrilinear societies. Adultery has little or no meaning in Sparta. Plutarch says this:

“The freedom which thus prevailed at that time in marriage relations was aimed at physical and political well-being, and was far removed from the licentiousness which was afterwards attributed to their women, so much so that adultery was wholly unknown among them.

And a saying is reported of one Geradas, a Spartan of very ancient type, who, on being asked by a stranger what the punishment for adulterers was among them, answered: ‘Stranger, there is no adulterer among us.’ ‘Suppose, then,’ replied the stranger, ‘there should be one.’ ‘A bull,’ said Geradas, ‘would be his forfeit, a bull so large that it could stretch over Mount Taÿgetus and drink from the river Eurotas.’ Then the stranger was astonished and said: ‘But how could there be a bull so large?’ To which Geradas replied, with a smile: ‘But how could there be an adulterer in Sparta?’ Such, then, are the accounts we find of their marriages.”(4)

Very unusual behavior in a patrilinear society. For such a thing to be true for the reasons stated (‘physical and political well-being) it would be necessary for there to be no organizing body whatsoever between the individual and the ephorate itself. The mechanisms of kinship would have to have entirely evaporated. This is a most unlikely prospect. A downgrading such as this of the seriousness of adultery (I dismiss the eugenic arguments of Plutarch and Xenophon as ex post facto rationalizations) is one of the classic forms in which a unilineal scheme which is losing its descent gender replenishes itself and it is also a factor in the development of full matrilinear forms. Xenophon comes close to admitting this by adducing the example of an elderly husband with a young wife.(5) If the pressure of loss of descent gender continues and grows more severe the entire system may transition into something very different from its original form.

I do not deny that Sparta’s kinship systems were patrilineal. I do maintain that a long history of military adventures and the functional sequestration of the men produced pressures of the kind that we associate with a transition to matriliny.

In my next post I will attempt to put a little simulated flesh on these bones by investigating what the Spartan Demographic Initiative may tell us in the face of such pressures.

NOTES

(1) Talbert (1988), 167. For a commentary see Lipka (2002), esp. 110-112.

(2) Lipka (2002) 112. Greek transliterated by me.

(3) Herodotus (2007) 95.

(4) Plutarch, Lyc., xv, 9-10. In Perrin (1914).

(5) At times Xenophon’s reasoning approaches the commedia dell’arte.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herodotus (2007). The Landmark Herodotus. The Histories. Robert B. Strassler, ed., Anchor Books, Random House, New York. 2007.

Lipka (2002). Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution: Introduction, Text, Commentary, De Gruyter, 2002. Lipka is epitomized online here.

Perrin (1914). Plutarch Lives, I, Theseus and Romulus. Lycurgus and Numa. Solon and Publicola. Harvard University Press (LCL). 1914. Online here.

Talbert (1988). Richard J.A. Talbert, Plutarch on Sparta, Penguin. 1988.

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.