Posted on 10/18/2002 4:18:48 PM PDT by Askel5
THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY IN HISTORYChristopher Dawson | 1933The traditional view of the family was founded on a somewhat naive and one-sided conception of history. The knowledge of the past was confined to the history of classical civilization and to that of the Jews, in both of which the patriarchal family reigned supreme. But when the European horizon was widened by the geographical discoveries of modern times, men suddenly realized the existence of societies whose social organization was utterly different to anything that they bad imagined. The discovery of totemism and exogamy, of matrilinear institutions, of polyandry, and of customs of organized sexual licence gave rise to a whole host of new theories concerning the origins of marriage and the family. Under the influence of the prevalent evolutionary philosophy, scholars like Lewis Morgan elaborated the theory of the gradual evolution of the family from a condition of primitive sexual promiscuity through various forms of group-marriage and temporary pairing up to the higher forms of patriarchal and monogamous marriage as they exist in developed civilizations. This theory naturally commended itself to socialists. It received the official imprimatur of the leaders of German Socialism in the later nineteenth century, and has become as much a part of orthodox socialist thought as the Marxian interpretation of history. It was, however, never fully accepted by the scientific world, and is today generally abandoned, although it still finds a few supporters among anthropologists. In England it is still maintained by Mr. E. S. Hartland and by Dr. Briffault, whose vast work The Mothers (3 Vols., 1927) is entirely devoted to the subject. According to Briffault, primitive society was purely matriarchal in organization, and the primitive family group consisted only of a woman and her offspring. A prolonged sexual association, such as we find in all existing forms of marriage, except in Russia., is neither natural nor primitive, and has no place in matriarchal society. The original social unit was not the family, but the clan which was based on matrilinear kinship and was entirely communistic in its sexual and economic relations. The family, as we understand it, owes nothing to biological or sexual causes, but is an economic institution arising from the development of private property and the consequent domination of women by men. It is “but a euphemism for the individualistic male with his subordinate dependents.” But in spite of its logical coherence, and the undoubted existence of matrilinear institutions in primitive society, this theory has not been borne out by recent investigations. The whole tendency of modern anthropology has been to discredit the old views regarding primitive promiscuity and sexual communism, and to emphasize the importance and universality of marriage. Whether the social organization is matrilinear or patrilinear, whether morality is strict or loose, it is the universal rule of every known society that a woman before she bears a child must be married to an individual male partner. The importance of this rule has been clearly shown by Dr. Malinowski. “The universal postulate of legitimacy,” he writes, “has a great sociological significance which is not yet sufficiently acknowledged. It means that in all human societies moral tradition and law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a sociologically complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here again on entirely the same lines as natural endowment; it declares that the human family must consist of the male as well as the female.” [1] It is impossible to go back behind the family and find a state of society in which the sexual relations are in a pre-social stage, for the regulation of sexual relations is an essential prerequisite of any kind of culture. The family is not a product of culture; it is, as Malinowski shows, “the starting point of all human organization” and “the cradle of nascent culture.” Neither the sexual nor the parental instinct is distinctively human. They exist equally among the animals, and they only acquire cultural significance when their purely biological function is transcended by the attainment of a permanent social relation. Marriage is the social consecration of the biological functions, by which the instinctive activities of sex and parenthood are socialized and a new synthesis of cultural and natural elements is created in the shape of the family. This synthesis differs from anything that exists in the animal world in that it no longer leaves man free to follow his own sexual instincts; he is forced to conform them to a certain social pattern. The complete freedom from restraint which was formerly supposed to be characteristic of savage life is a romantic myth. In all primitive societies sexual relations are regulated by a complex and meticulous system of restrictions, any breach of which is regarded not merely as an offence against tribal law, but as morally sinful. These rules mostly have their origin in the fear of incest, which is the fundamental crime against the family, since it leads to the disorganization of family sentiment and the destruction of family authority. It is unnecessary to insist upon the importance of the consequences of this fear of incest in both individual and social psychology, since it is the fundamental thesis of Freud and his school. Unfortunately, in his historical treatment of the subject, in Totem and Tabu, he inverts the true relation, and derives the sociological structure from a pre-existent psychological complex instead of vice versa. In reality, as Dr. Malinowski has shown, the fundamental repression which lies at the root of social life is not the suppressed memory of an instinctive crime -- Freud’s prehistoric Oedipus tragedy -- but a deliberate constructive repression of anti-social impulses.
The beginning of culture implies the repression of instincts, and all the essentials of the Oedipus complex or any other complex are necessary by-products in the gradual formation of culture. [2] The institution of the family inevitably creates a vital tension which is creative as well as painful. For human culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and the subordination and sacrifice of the individual impulse to the social purpose. It is the fundamental error of the modern hedonist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effort and the stricter is the social discipline that it demands. The old type of matrilinear society, though it is by no means devoid of moral discipline, involves considerably less repression and is consistent with a much laxer standard of sexual behaviour than is usual in patriarchal societies. But at the same time it is not capable of any high cultural achievement or of adapting itself to changed circumstances. It remains bound to its elaborate and cumbrous mechanism of tribal custom. The patriarchal family, on the other hand, makes much greater demands on human nature. It requires chastity and self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and obedience and discipline on the part of the children, while even the father himself has to assume a heavy burden of responsibility and submit his personal feelings to the interests of the family tradition. But for these very reasons the patriarchal family is a much more efficient organ of cultural life. It is no longer limited to its primary sexual and reproductive functions. It becomes the dynamic principle of society and the source of social continuity. Hence, too, it acquires a distinctively religious character, which was absent in matrilinear societies, and which is now expressed in the worship of the family hearth or the sacred fire and the ceremonies of the ancestral cult. The fundamental idea in marriage is no longer the satisfaction of the sexual appetite, but, as Plato says: “the need that every man feels of clinging to the eternal life of nature by leaving behind him children’s children who may minister to the gods in his stead. [3] This religious exaltation of the family profoundly affects men’s attitude to marriage and the sexual aspects of life in general. It is not limited, as is often supposed, to the idealization of the possessive male as father and head of the household; it equally transforms the conception of womanhood. It was the patriarchal family which created those spiritual ideals of motherhood and virginity which have had so deep an influence on the moral development of culture. No doubt the deification of womanhood, through the worship of the Mother Goddess had its origin in the ancient matrilinear societies. But the primitive Mother Goddess is a barbaric and formidable deity who embodies the ruthless fecundity of nature, and her rites are usually marked by licentiousness and cruelty. It was the patriarchal culture which transformed this sinister goddess into the gracious figures of Demeter and Persephone and Aphrodite, and which created those higher types of divine virginity which we see in Athene, the giver of good counsel, and Artemis, the guardian of youth. The patriarchal society was in fact the creator of those moral ideas which have entered so deeply into the texture of civilization that they have become a part of our thought. Not only the names of piety and chastity, honour and modesty, but the values for which they stand are derived from this source, so that even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created. [4] Consequently, we find that the existing world civilizations from Europe to China are all founded on the tradition of the patriarchal family. It is to this that they owed the social strength which enabled them to prevail over the old cultures of matrilinear type which, alike in Europe and in Western Asia, in China and in India, had preceded the coming of the great classical cultures. Moreover, the stability of the latter has proved to be closely dependent on the preservation of the patriarchal ideal. A civilization like that of China, in which the patriarchal family remained the cornerstone of society and the foundation of religion and ethics, has preserved its cultural traditions for more than 2,000 years without losing its vitality. In the classical cultures of the Mediterranean world, however, this was not the case. Here the patriarchal family failed to adapt itself to the urban conditions of the Hellenistic civilization, and consequently the whole culture lost its stability. Conditions of life both in the Greek city state and in the Roman Empire favoured the man without a family who could devote his whole energies to the duties and pleasures of public life. Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. [5] And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire, where the citizen class even in the provinces was extraordinarily sterile and was recruited not by natural increase, but by the constant introduction of alien elements, above all from the servile class. Thus the ancient world lost its roots alike in the family and in the land and became prematurely withered. The reconstitution of Western civilization was due to the coming of Christianity and the re-establishment of the family on a new basis. Though the Christian ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which finds such a complete expression in the Old Testament, it was in several respects a new creation that differed essentially from anything that had previously existed. While the patriarchal family in its original form was an aristocratic institution which was the privilege of a ruling race or a patrician class, the Christian family was common to every class, even to the slaves. [6] Still more important was the fact that the Church insisted for the first time on the mutual and bilateral character of sexual obligations. The husband belonged to the wife as exclusively as the wife to the husband. This rendered marriage a more personal and individual relation than it bad been under the patriarchal system. The family was no longer a subsidiary member of a larger unity -- the kindred or “gens.” It was an autonomous self-contained unit which owed nothing to any power outside itself. It is precisely this character of exclusiveness and strict mutual obligation which is the chief ground of objection among the modern critics of Christian morality. But whatever may be thought of it, there can be no doubt that the resultant type of monogamous and indissoluble marriage has been the foundation of European society and has conditioned the whole development of our civilization. No doubt it involves a very severe effort of repression and discipline, but its, upholders would maintain that it has rendered possible an achievement which could never have been equalled under the laxer conditions of polygamous or matrilinear societies. There is no historical justification of Bertrand Russell’s belief that the Christian attitude to marriage has had a brutalizing effect on sexual relations and has degraded the position of woman below even the level of ancient civilization: on the contrary, women have always had a wider share in social life and a greater influence on civilization in Europe than was the case either in Hellenic or oriental society. And this is in part due to those very ideals of asceticism and chastity which Bertrand Russell regards as the source of all our troubles. For in a Catholic civilization the patriarchal ideal is counterbalanced by the ideal of virginity. The family for all its importance does not control the whole existence of its members. The spiritual side of life belongs to a spiritual society in which all authority is reserved to a celibate class. Thus in one of the most important aspects of life the sexual relation is transcended, and husband and wife stand on an equal footing. I believe that this is the chief reason why the feminine element has achieved fuller expression in Catholic culture and why, even at the present day [1933], the feminine revolt against the restrictions of family life is so much less marked in Catholic society than elsewhere. In Protestant Europe, on the other hand, the Reformation, by abandoning the ideal of virginity and by the destruction of monasticism and of the independent authority of the Church, accentuated the masculine element in the family. The Puritan spirit, nourished on the traditions of the Old Testament, created a new patriarchalism and made the family the religious as well as the social basis of society. Civilization lost its communal and public character and became private and domestic. And yet, by a curious freak of historical development, it was this Puritan and patriarchal society which gave birth to the new economic order which now threatens to destroy the family,. Industrialism grew up, not in the continental centres of urban culture, but in the most remote districts of rural England, in the homes of nonconformist weavers and ironworkers. The new industrial society was entirely destitute of the communal spirit and of the civic traditions which had marked the ancient and the mediaeval city. It existed simply for the production of wealth and left every other side of life to private initiative. Although the old rural culture, based on the household as an independent economic unit, was passing away for ever, the strict ethos of the Puritan family continued to rule men’s lives. This explains the anomalies of the Victorian period both in England and America. It was essentially an age of transition. Society had already entered on a phase of intense urban industrialism, while still remaining faithful to the patriarchal ideals of the old Puritan tradition. Both Puritan morality and industrial mass economy were excessive and one-sided developments, and when the two were brought together in one society they inevitably produced an impossible situation. The problem that faces us today is, therefore, not so much the result of an intellectual revolt against the traditional Christian morality, it is due to the inherent contradictions of an abnormal state of culture. The natural tendency, which is even more clearly visible in America than in England, is for the Puritan tradition to be abandoned and for society to give itself up passively to the machinery of modern cosmopolitan life. But this is no solution. It leads merely to the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place. As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members. The home is no longer a centre of social activity; it has become merely a sleeping place for a number of independent wage-earners. The functions which were formerly fulfilled by the head of the family are now being taken over by the state, which educates the children and takes the responsibility for their maintenance and health. Consequently, the father no longer holds a vital position in the family: as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, he is often a comparative stranger to his children, who know him only as “that man who comes for week-ends.” Moreover, the reaction against the restrictions of family life which in the ancient world was confined to the males of the citizen class, is today common to every class and to both sexes. To the modern girl marriage and motherhood appear not as the conditions of a wider life, as they did to her grandmother, but as involving the sacrifice of her independence and the abandonment of her career. The only remaining safeguards of family life in modern urban civilization are its social prestige and the sanctions of moral and religious tradition. Marriage is still the only form of sexual union which is openly tolerated by society, and the ordinary man and woman are usually ready to sacrifice their personal convenience rather than risk social ostracism. But if we accept the principles of the new morality, this last safeguard will be destroyed and the forces of dissolution will be allowed to operate unchecked. It is true that Mr. Russell, at least, is willing to leave us the institution of marriage, on condition that it is strictly demoralized and no longer makes any demands on continence. But it is obvious that these conditions reduce marriage to a very subordinate position. It is no longer the exclusive or even the normal form of sexual relations: it is entirely limited to the rearing of children. For, as Mr. Russell is never tired of pointing out, the use of contraceptives has made sexual intercourse independent of parenthood, and the marriage of the future will be confined to those who seek parenthood for its own sake rather than as the natural, fulfillment of sexual love. But under these circumstances who will trouble to marry? Marriage will lose all attractions for the young and the pleasure-loving and the poor and the ambitious. The energy of youth will be devoted to contraceptive love and only when men and women have become prosperous and middle-aged will they think seriously of settling down to rear a strictly limited family. It is impossible to imagine a system more contrary to the first principles of social well-being. So far from helping modern society to surmount its present difficulties, it only precipitates the crisis. It must lead inevitably to a social decadence far more rapid and more universal than that which brought about the disintegration of ancient civilization. The advocates of birth-control can hardly fail to realize the consequences of a progressive decline of the population in a society in which it is already almost stationary, but for all that their propaganda is entirely directed towards a further diminution in the birth rate. Many of them, like Dr. Stopes, are no doubt so much concerned with the problem of individual happiness that they do not stop to consider how the race is to be carried on. Others, such as Mr. Russell, are obsessed by the idea that over-population is the main cause of war and that a diminishing birth rate is the best guarantee of international peace. There is, however, nothing in history to justify this belief. The largest and most prolific populations, such as the Chinese and the Hindus, have always been singularly unaggressive. The most warlike peoples are usually those who are relatively backward in culture and few in numbers, like the Huns and the Mongols, or the English in the fifteenth century, the Swedes in the seventeenth century, and the Prussians in the eighteenth century. If, however, questions of population should give rise to war in the future, there can be no doubt that it is nations with wide possessions and a dwindling population who will be most likely to provoke an attack. But it is much more likely that the process will be a peaceful one. The peoples who allow the natural bases of society to be destroyed by the artificial conditions of the new urban civilization will gradually disappear and their place will be taken by those populations which live under simpler conditions and preserve the traditional forms of the family. [1] B. Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), p. 213. Return to Text [2] Malinowski, op. cit., p..i82. [3] Laws, 773 F. [4] For this reason the Catholic Church has always associated its teaching on marriage with the patriarchal tradition, and even today she still concludes the marriage service with the ancient patriarchal benediction: ‘May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, be with you and may he fulfill his blessing upon you that you may see your children’s children even to the third and fourth generation.” [5] He writes that in his days the diminution of population in Greece was so great that the towns were becoming deserted and the fields untilled. The reason of this is neither war nor pestilence, but because men “owing to vanity avarice or cowardice, no longer wish to marry or to bring up children.” In Boeotia especially he notes a tendency for men to leave their property to clubs for public benefactions instead of leaving it to their heirs, “so that the Boeotians often have more free dinners than there are days in the month.”. Polyb., Books XXXVI, 17, and XX, 6. [6] The same change, however, has taken place in China, where, owing to the influence of Confucianism, the whole population has gradually acquired the family institutions which were originally peculiar to the members of the feudal nobility.
|
But when the European horizon was widened by the geographical discoveries of modern times, men suddenly realized the existence of societies whose social organization was utterly different to anything that they bad imagined.The discovery of totemism and exogamy, of matrilinear institutions, of polyandry, and of customs of organized sexual licence gave rise to a whole host of new theories concerning the origins of marriage and the family.
This was written in 1933, and is pretty clearly heavily influenced by the 1928 publication of Margaret Mead's nine-day wonder, "Coming of Age in Samoa", and her 1930 work "Growing Up in New Guinea". The trouble is, virtually no societies like these described here have ever actually existed, Mead's fevered imaginings notwithstanding.
That's the basic problem here - the author wants to make the case that "traditional" family arrangements prevailed over "non-traditional" arrangements, but in so doing he's accepted the basic premise that such "non-traditional" arrangements have ever really existed in the first place. And once you do that, you're reduced to quibbling over the details.
And it's not very good quibbling, either. If patriarchy is the key, then there were few societies that were more patriarchal than classical Rome - the Romans invented the concept of patria potestas, and they took it to extremes not really seen in any other society. But here we're told that they "failed to adapt to urban life" (why, we aren't really told), and thus lost out in spite of their patriarchal society.
Anyway, if you want to argue in favor of traditional families, it seems to me that the classical conservative argument is still the best argument - "non-traditional" arrangements don't really exist in the way some would have you believe, and never have existed, really. So let us not embrace the new and untested simply for the sake of novelty, which is all you've got in the absence of a track-record - traditional families have served us all quite well over the last few thousand years, and we ought to be loathe to simply abandon that time-tested experience for the latest fad in "alternative families".
The moral of the article might as well be: don't frame your own argument in such a way as to implicitly accept the basic premises of your opponents. Do that, and you've lost right off the bat, because you're arguing on someone else's home field ;)
I think he too is rather dismissive of the matriarchy thing ... flat out say any such society is negligible because it cannot -- never has -- produced anything remarkable in the least.
What about his two paragraphs on the Hellenistic civilization. He appears to be describing us.
As again he does appear to nail us in the second to last paragraph.
It's overloading the concept of family, in a sense - the decline of cultures is a complicated thing that doesn't lend itself well to simple theories about the breakdown of family structures. If non-traditional families led to the "decline" of Rome (over the space of several hundred years, no less), why didn't the introduction of Christian values revive it? Why is American influence and power apparently waxing at the very moment that the "traditional" American family is waning?
Thin. Complex events tend to have complex causes...
I think he too is rather dismissive of the matriarchy thing ... flat out say any such society is negligible because it cannot -- never has -- produced anything remarkable in the least.
But that's the point - matriarchal societies have produced nothing remarkable because the number of truly matriarchal societies we know about from history right now is exactly zero. There's no evidence that even primitive neolithic societies were matriarchal - all that happy-happy peaceful pagan Goddess-worshipping tribes (until those damn testosterone-loaded men wrecked it all) bullshit is just that. Bullshit modern mythmaking. There never was a society like that.
What about his two paragraphs on the Hellenistic civilization. He appears to be describing us.
His counterexamples don't follow, though - ask the Tibetans or the Vietnamese about the "peaceful" Chinese. Ask the Pakistanis about the non-aggression of the Hindus. The English may have been a bit thin on the population end of it, but they were hardly "backward" by the standards of the 15'th century. Backwards compared to whom?
Anyway, the trouble with historical analogy is that this is terra incognita in some ways - the "American experiment" continues unabated, and it's increasingly difficult to find historical analogues in some particular aspect. We're a culture built on the notion of exceptionalism - it's served us well so far. Why give up on it now? ;)
Because we're losing the culture wars against those who would destroy us from within?
Those who don't pay attention to history being doomed to repeat it.
And -- given the way our guys are legitimizing homosexuality and de facto unions, invoking population controls (state sanctioned birth control and abortion), upholding and specifically protecting For-Profit Porn as "Free Speech", cranking the legal system AGAINST the father in particular with their "weeding out the white male" syndrome and even seeking to pad our imploding reproduction rate with the drafting in of immigrants ... ALL OF WHICH is taking place under a dizzying assault of the most lurid and decadent salvo of sex and perversion to which any age of man has ever been subjected.
Bob "Down Boy!" Dole hawking Viagra?
C'mon guy ... we first tangled on the "War Stressed Prostitutes" thread wherein I was balking at the notion that men were entitled not only to use sex as "stress relief" but -- desensitized readers of the Penthouse Forum they are -- sit and detail their escapades on a forum ostensibly a mecca for Conservatives and the wives and family of military men looking for the latest on the war in Afghanistan. You think a thread where folks are down to talking about what their bunk buddies do with their black socks isn't clogging latest posts and attracting some attention?
And I was FLAYED ALIVE for having the audacity to complain about "men being men".
Boys is more like it.
I could take 30 minutes and likely bury this thread in links on how marriage is "passe", no longer attractive for men, how women have their own money and don't need men if they can pay top dollar for a nanny (unless they want the ever-more popular "Trophy Husband" who's content to work at home while the wife pulls down the big bucks in Diversity Land where the Corporate Governance types have taken a page from the Bush I Administration's military and made no bones about "weeding out the white male" in favor of women, minories and homosexuals).
Maybe it's all just happening too fast for you do draw the connections.
I realize population control and culture wars are kind of my bag but I really am kinda stunned you dismiss him out of hand because he starts with what may well have been the rage at the time but -- without a doubt -- is the bottom of the heap where civilizations are concerned ... the same "alternative" lifestyles all the rage today.
With the added incentive, of course, that is our sexually liberated and Enlightened society's having removed the stigma entirely from either aborting or keeping -- or purchasing to spec -- your illegitimate and fatherless child.
I realize population control and culture wars are kind of my bag but I really am kinda stunned you dismiss him out of hand because he starts with what may well have been the rage at the time but -- without a doubt -- is the bottom of the heap where civilizations are concerned ... the same "alternative" lifestyles all the rage today.
I'm trying not to dismiss it out of hand. You (and he, I think) argue that those societies are the bottom of the heap - I'm saying to you that those societies never really existed in the first place. IOW, once you accept that such a thing exists, you inevitably open the door for airy-fairy Margaret Mead and her intellectual heirs to come over and lecture you about how wonderful they were, and how happy and well-adjusted everyone was. And you're basically reduced to arguing about how horrible or wonderful these completely imaginary cultures were, and trying to apply the lessons of these imaginary cultures to modern society. He's pointing to someone else's imaginary pie-in-the-sky and telling us it's a steaming pile of dung. Fine, but it sort of misses the obvious point that it's pie-in-the-sky in the first place...
But I think you mistook what I said in my other post anyway - my point is that American power and influence is at its very peak exactly when the traditional family is on the decline. So maybe the two aren't directly linked after all, or maybe they are, but there are a whole host of other factors....
As were many of the great theologians. What's that got to do with anything?
tut-tut. Did you care to know? Let's just put it this way. Sometimes the one wants nothing to do with the other.
Such as...?
The question deviates. It matters when it does, but it does not always matter. Your own examples will work fine, but not every time.
Polybius brought up this point in his Histories, Book XXXVI, when he discussed when historians should not attribute certain calamities of society to the work of Fate or Chance or the Gods.
Polybius noted that, for example, a natural disaster such as a flood from heavy rains or a drought could be attributed to Fate or a god for lack of a better explanation.
However, Polybius observed that the explanation for many of the calamities that certain communities suffered from needed no further explanation than the examination of the behavior of the people in those societies.
"Now indeed as regards things the causes of which it is impossible or difficult for a mere man to understand, we may perhaps be justified in getting out of the difficulty by setting them down to the action of a god or of chance, I mean such things as exceptionally heavy and continuous rain or snow, or on the other hand the destruction of crops by severe drought or frost, or a persistent outbreak of plague or other similar things of which it is not easy to detect the cause. So in regard to such matters we naturally bow to public opinion, as we cannot make out why they happen, and attempting by prayer and sacrifice to appease the heavenly powers, we send to ask the gods what we must do and say, to set things right and cause the evil that afflicts us to cease.
But as for matters the efficient and final cause of which it is possible to discover we should not, I think, put them down to divine action. For instance, take the following case.
In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics. If, then, any one had advised us to send and ask the gods about this, and find out what we ought to say or do, to increase in number and make our cities more populous, would it not seem absurd, the cause of the evil being evident and the remedy being in our own hands?
For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensilby grew. For in cases where of one or two children the one was carried off by war and the other by sickness, it is evident that the houses must have been left unoccupied, and as in the case of swarms of bees, so by small degrees cities became resourceless and feeble.
About this it was of no use at all to ask the gods to suggest a means of deliverance from such an evil. For any ordinary man will tell you that the most effectual cure had to be men's own action, in either striving after other objects, or if not, in passing laws making it compulsory to rear children. Neither prophets nor magic were here of any service, and the same holds good for all particulars."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.