Polygamy and concubinage having in process of time become fashionable
vices, the number of women kept by the great became at last more an
article of grandeur and state, than a mode of satisfying the animal
appetite: Solomon had threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and
virgins without number. Maimon tells us, that among the Jews a man might
have as many wives as he pleased, even to the number of a hundred, and
that it was not in their power to prevent him, provided he could
maintain, and pay them all the conjugal debt once a week; but in this
duty he was not to run in arrear to any of them above a month, though
with regard to concubines he might do as he pleased.
It would be an endless task to enumerate all the nations which practised
polygamy; we shall, therefore, only mention a few, where the practice
seemed to vary something from the common method. The ancient Sabaeans are
not only said to have had a plurality, but even a community of wives; a
thing strongly inconsistent with that spirit of jealousy which prevails
among men in most countries where polygamy is allowed. The ancient
Germans were so strict monogamists,[3] that they reckoned it a species
of polygamy for a woman to marry a second husband even after the death
of the first. "A woman (say they) has but one life, and but one body,
therefore should have but one husband;" and besides, they added, "that
she who knows she is never to have a second husband, will the more value
and endeavor to promote the happiness and preserve the life of the
first." Among the Heruli this idea was carried farther, a woman was
obliged to strangle herself at the death of her husband, lest she
should, afterwards marry another; so detestable was polygamy in the
North, while in the East it is one of these rights which they most of
all others esteem, and maintain with such inflexible firmness, that it
will probably be one of the last of those that it will wrest out of
their hands.
The Egyptians, it is probable, did not allow of polygamy, and as the
Greeks borrowed their institutions from them, it was also forbid by the
laws of Cecrops, though concubinage seems either to have been allowed or
overlooked; for in the Odyssey of Homer we find Ulysses declaring
himself to be the son of a concubine, which he would probably not have
done, had any degree of infamy been annexed to it. In some cases,
however, polygamy was allowed in Greece, from a mistaken notion that it
would increase population. The Athenians, once thinking the number of
their citizens diminished, decreed that it should be lawful for a man to
have children by another woman as well as by his wife; besides this,
particular instances occur of some who have transgressed the law of
monogamy. Euripides is said to have had two wives, who, by their
constant disagreement, gave him a dislike to the whole sex; a
supposition which receives some weight from these lines of his in
Andromache:
ne'er will I commend
More beds, more wives than one, nor children curs'd
With double mothers, banes and plagues of life.
Socrates too had two wives, but the poor culprit
had as much reason to repent of his temerity
as Euripides.
[3] Monogamy is having only one wife.