The Queen - Matt Ridley

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wet nursing, fertility monitoring, claustration of the concubines, and so on. These are not the measures of men interested in sexual excess: They are the measures of men interested in producing many children.

However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out: All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. In other words, they always raised one mate above all the others as a "queen." This is characteristic of human polygamous societies: Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife-who is treated differently from the others: She is usually noble-born, and crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs: Solomon had a thousand concubines and one queen: Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending , from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses: Julius Caesar 's affairs with women were "commonly described as extravagant " (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote, "The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for deflower-ing girls—who were collected for him by his wife: " Tiberius 's

" criminal lusts" were " worthy of an oriental tyrant " (Tacitus).

Caligula "made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome "

(Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him "sundry housemaids to lie with " (Dio): When Nero floated down the Tiber, he "had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore " (Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.

Nor were emperors special: When a rich patrician named Gordian died leading a rebellion in favor of his father against the emperor Maximin in A:D: 237, Gibbon commemorated him thus:

" Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested to the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than osten-tation. "

POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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" Ordinary " Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves: Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth: Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not: If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller: And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth: The unre-stricted sexual availability of slaves "is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it. "4z

Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth. This cannot have been an economically sensible decision: Freed slaves became rich and numerous: Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most slaves who were freed had been born in their masters ' homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely freed: There seems little doubt that Roman nobles were freeing their illegitimate sons, bred of female slaves."

When Betzig turned her attention to medieval Christendom, she discovered that the phenomenon of monogamous marriage and polygamous mating was so entrenched that it required some disinterring. Polygamy became more secret, but it did not expire: In medieval times the census shows a sex ratio in the coun-tryside that was heavily male-biased because so many women were

" employed " in the castles and monasteries: Their jobs were those of serving maids of various kinds, but they formed a loose sort of

" harem" whose size depended clearly on the wealth and power of the castle 's owner: In some cases ,historians and authors were more or less explicit in admitting that castles contained "gynoeciums, "

where lived the owner 's harem in secluded luxury: Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert,

" was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons. " His bedchamber had access to the

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servant girls ' quarters and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs.

It had access, too, to the warming room, "a veritable incubator for suckling infants. " Meanwhile, many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication."

THE REWARDS OF VIOLENCE

If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been afrequent cause and reward of violence. This is presumably the reason that the early Church became so obsessed with matters of sex. It recognized sexual competition to be one of the principal causes of murder and mayhem. The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex. 4f Consider the case of the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1790 nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. Thousands of miles from the nearest habitation, unknown to the world, they set about building a life on the little island. Notice the imbalance: fifteen men and thirteen women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later, ten of the women had survived and only one of the men. Of the other men, one had committed suicide, one had died, and twelve had been murdered: The survivor was simply the last man left standing in an orgy of violence motivated entirely by sexual competition. He promptly underwent a conversion to Christianity and prescribed monogamy for Pitcairn society. Until the 1930s the colony prospered and good genealogical records were kept. Studies of these show that the prescription worked. Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous. 46

Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men. According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes that so frustrated several Roman emperors attributed their success partly to the fact that they were a POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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monogamous society and therefore able to direct their aggression outward (though no such explanation applied to the polygamous and successful Romans): No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife. Not that socially imposed monogamy need extend to captive slaves. In the nineteenth century in Borneo, one tribe, the Iban, dominated the tribal wars of the island. Unlike their neighbors, the Iban were monogamous, which both prevented the accumulation of sullen bachelors in their ranks and motivated them to feats of great daring with the prize of foreign female slaves as reward."

One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence.

Until the 1970s primatologists were busy confirming our prejudices about peaceable apes living in nonviolent societies. Then they began to observe the rare but more sinister side of chimp life: The males of a chimpanzee "tribe" sometimes conduct violent campaigns against the males of another tribe, seeking out and killing their enemies: This habit is very different from the territoriality of many animals, who are content to expel intruders. The prize may be to seize the enemy territory, but that is a small reward for so dangerous a business: A far richer reward awaits the successful male alliance: young females of the defeated group join the victors. 48