Marriage, a History (14 page)

In Athens, aristocrats recognized the need for reform before a tyrant arose from their ranks, and in 594 B.C. they elected one of their number, Solon, to the office of archon. But Solon was unable to bring the feuding nobles under control. Another aristocrat then seized power and tried with only mixed success to establish a stable tyranny. Not until Cleisthenes came to power in 508 B.C., did the tyranny lay the foundation for Athenian democracy. Under Cleisthenes and his successors, the city-state of Athens was able to curb aristocratic politics and dynastic rule more drastically than any other ancient state, anticipating some of the measures adopted two thousand years later in Western Europe.

Athenian reformers promoted civil laws, abstract principles of justice, and norms of patriotism that could supplant the narrow obligations of blood ties and personal alliances. One sixth-century B.C. law enabled “anyone who wished,” not just a relative, to seek redress for an injured party by initiating legal action against the culprit. The law also prohibited the culprit’s kin from exacting vengeance against someone who sued for justice. Other legislation limited the inheritance rights of children born to concubines or “spear-won” women. Inheritance claims based solely on blood descent were no longer sufficient; a state-sanctioned marriage of the parents was now required. In addition, Athenian leaders tried to limit aristocratic families to a largely ceremonial role in religious cults. All these prohibitions were aimed at undermining aristocratic methods of gaining social status and attracting followers.

The most radical attack on the traditional political privileges of aristocratic families was the establishment of the Council of 500, Athens’s main administrative body. By the beginning of the fifth century B.C., the Council was selected by lot, as were jurors. This prevented powerful kin groups from controlling elections and court decisions and gave every citizen the chance to play an active role in government.

In practice, Athenian democracy was very limited. There were twice as many slaves as citizens, and no woman or foreigner had citizenship rights. But for those who were included, this nascent democracy had extraordinary implications, undercutting the ability of aristocratic families to build and maintain their private power bases.

Wealth and family connections still counted. But Athenian legislators no longer allowed noble families to recruit and command their own armies on the basis of personal loyalty and family ties, instead requiring individual households to furnish soldiers directly to the city-state. On Athens’s public buildings and coins, likenesses of the patron goddess Athena Nike and the owl, symbol of wisdom, replaced the crests of noble families. Athena had no conflicting family and marital allegiances. Legend said she had sprung full grown from the head of Zeus and therefore lacked any maternal in-laws to compete with her loyalty to the state.

The city-state also asserted its authority to represent the interests of orphans, minors, and even unborn children, who formerly would have been under the jurisdiction and control of the extended family. The introduction of wills, as the word implies, meant that the kin group could no longer automatically claim the properties of its deceased members. These and similar measures also made the individual nuclear family household more independent in relation to its larger kindred group.

These political changes were accompanied by vehement attacks on the privileges and customary practices of aristocratic families, especially the marital intrigues, personal power plays, and shifting alliances that characterized their struggles for power. Aristotle held that citizens owed their primary loyalties to the state, not to themselves or their families. Plato, writing about his ideal republic, suggested that families be abolished altogether.

A more common approach in Greek literature was to attack women who placed loyalty to their extended families above their wifely obligations to their husbands. A woman’s continuing ties to her birth family came to symbolize the worst excesses of aristocratic rule, and Athenian playwrights developed this theme in tragedies that still capture our imagination.

Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, leveled a powerful indictment of aristocratic governance and marriage politics in his fifth-century B.C. three-play cycle
The Oresteia.
The plays, based on a traditional Greek legend, condemn aristocratic marital intrigues and advocate a new hierarchy of obligations.

The first play of the trilogy begins as Agamemnon, king of Argos, returns home from the Trojan Wars. He does not know that his wife, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and that together they have plotted his death. The opening chorus explains that each of the adulterous pair has legitimate grievances against Agamemnon and his forefathers. On his way to Troy, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds for his ships. Clytemnestra has brooded for years over his murder of their daughter. For his part, Aegisthus longs to avenge his brothers, whom Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had murdered and fed to Aegisthus’s unsuspecting father, because the father had once slept with Atreus’s wife: “Bloodshed bringing in its train/Kindred blood that flows again,/Anger still unreconciled /. . . Wreaking vengeance for a murdered child.”
²

Agamemnon, however, is oblivious to these resentments. On his return from the war, he enters the palace haughtily, giving instructions for the care of the concubine he has brought home with him. Clytemnestra then kills him offstage. She and Aegisthus proceed to banish Orestes, her son by Agamemnon, and announce they will rule together in peace. Although the play expects us to condemn the lovers’ behavior, the two victors were more humane than many real-life ancient rulers, who ruthlessly killed all the descendants of their foes, even those to whom they were themselves related.

The second play in the cycle takes place seven years later. The banished son, Orestes, returns, having been ordered by the god Apollo to avenge his father’s death or face the Furies, goddesses who punish those who shed the blood of kin, betray a host or guest, or blaspheme the gods. The Furies, who represent the old-fashioned principles of family vengeance, never punished Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, because her husband was not a blood relation. Nor did they try to get Orestes to kill her in revenge. It is only Apollo who threatens to unleash them, to prod Orestes into action. But as soon as Orestes does kill Clytemnestra, the Furies—“avenging hounds, incensed by a mother’s blood”—descend upon him. Although they had done nothing to punish the murder of a husband by a wife, they are outraged by the murder of a mother by a child.

The last play addresses the dilemma the first two have posed. Which is the worse of two crimes? In one case a wife kills a husband, not a blood relation, who has shed their daughter’s blood and has then insulted the wife further by bringing a concubine into their home. In the other case a son kills a mother who has committed adultery and murdered her husband. This is a tough call by aristocratic standards. The bonds between a mother and child are at least as strong as those between husband and wife, and even within the general context of male dominance, a highborn wife has a right to exact vengeance for slights against her dignity.

But in the play the answer of the state, represented by Apollo, is unequivocal: A woman’s duty to her husband and ruler outweighs the claims of kinship. “He was a king/Wielding an honoured sceptre by divine command,” says Apollo. Mother-child bonds are insignificant compared with the duty of wifely obedience. “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers,” Apollo declares. “She is a nurse who tends the growth/of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”

In the final moments of the play Athena, by now the patron goddess of Athens, confirms Apollo’s judgment. In a conciliatory gesture, however, she offers the Furies a new role if they become the “Friendly Goddesses,” blessing people’s homes and gardens rather than enforcing the claims of blood. They can settle in Athens and be worshiped by a grateful citizenry if they will call an end to family feuds and blood vengeance: “Let war be with the stranger, at the stranger’s gate./There let men fall in love with glory; but at home/Let no cocks fight.”

In the “happy ending” to this tale of wrongs and opposing wrongs, the Furies become the defenders of a nonpolitical form of marriage and of the priority of civil law over family feuds and vendettas. They encourage people to honor such traditional aristocratic virtues as kinship ties, ancestral gods, and heroism in battle, but to do so in the service of the state rather than of family or personal interests. Marriage is to be a private affair, marked by dominance of the husband and subordination of the wife and producing orderly inheritance from father to son.

The Oresteia
was not, of course, real history. But it spoke to the widespread discontent with the personal and marital intrigues of aristocratic rule. The cycle premiered in Athens just four years after a series of major reforms had expanded the authority of civic institutions and further undercut aristocratic politics based on family and marriage. These included a citizen assembly open to all male citizens over eighteen years of age; a popular court where six thousand jurors, chosen without regard to class, decided legal disputes; and an executive council chosen by lot.

The fear of powerful women expressed in
The Oresteia
and many other Greek tragedies reflected a distrust of aristocrats’ extended family ties. Athenian leaders were anxious to convert marriage into an association of two individuals rather than two kin groups. While they did not prevent aristocrats or rich commoners from contracting economically and politically advantageous marriages, they did make a concerted effort to relegate women to a private, secondary sphere of life, so that women could not confer status in their own right.

One law enacted by Pericles in 451-50 B.C. declared that a man could not be a citizen of Athens unless his mother as well as his father was Athenian. This seems to contradict the idea that women were not even the true parents of their children, merely vessels that carried men’s seed. But the law aimed to reduce the number of strategic marriages in which Athenian aristocrats took foreign wives and forged connections with powerful in-laws in another city-state or empire. An Athenian who contracted such a marriage would deprive his heirs of citizenship rights.

The world’s first experiment in democratic government did nothing to improve the rights and social status of wives. At every point in her life a woman in Greece was subject to the formal guardianship of a man. While she was unmarried, her father and brother controlled her behavior and were responsible for her support, including providing her with a dowry so that she could be married. Upon her marriage, the husband took control. Not even widowhood freed a woman from subordination to men because after her husband’s death her sons had authority to act on her behalf.

The transfer of authority from father to husband was arranged at the betrothal, when the father declared, “I give you this woman for the procreation of legitimate children.” The young man replied, “I take her,” and the father announced the amount of dowry agreed upon. A husband had a unilateral right to divorce, although if he repudiated his wife without cause, he had to return the dowry with 18 percent interest.
³

Wives in wealthy Greek families generally remained indoors or in the inner courtyards of the home, spending much of their time in upstairs rooms that could be closed off from the rest of the household. When Greeks described the activities of a virtuous woman, it was in far less active terms than those from the Old Testament. A respectable Greek wife certainly could not purchase a piece of farmland (she couldn’t even go to view it), or sell her linens in public, or deliver girdles to the merchant as did the virtuous woman described in the Old Testament. One Athenian boasted: “My sisters and nieces have been so well brought up that they are embarrassed in the presence of a man who is not a member of the family.” There was plenty for women to do, of course, including the spinning and weaving mentioned in the Bible and the supervision of slaves, but a respectable Greek wife did it all from inside the house.
⁴

Aristotle acknowledged that it was impossible for ordinary commoners to keep their women indoors all the time, and records indicate that some women were out in public as laundresses, seamstresses, bakers, vendors, innkeepers, and the like. But Athens was one of the few societies in history prior to the nineteenth century that idealized the role of wives as dependent homemakers rather than as work mates for their husbands.

A man’s responsibility for his dependent wife was seen not as part of the mutual duties of marriage but as a necessary form of social discipline, similar to the control men exercised over children and animals. Socrates made explicit the connection between women and animals, arguing that when a wife is bad, the husband is to blame for not training her properly, just as it is the rider’s fault when a horse turns vicious.
⁵

As in any society, there were affectionate and even passionate marriages in Greece. But the Greek model for true love was not the relationship between husband and wife. The truest love was held to exist in the association of an adult man with a much younger male.

An Athenian man, writes historian Eve Cantarella, “expressed his better side, intelligence, will for self-improvement, and a higher level of emotions” in dignified homosexual relations. Licentious sex violated the value Athenians placed on self-control, but in its proper place, homosexual sex was an accepted part of a young man’s moral and political education. Interestingly, male prostitution was punished as a crime, but female prostitution was not. Cantarella believes that the rationale for this law was that the introduction of payment between men degraded a relationship that was highly valued as long as it was based on free choice.
⁶