Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/28

 18 FAMILY the first household (oi/a a irpwrrj} from the combination of man s possession of property in the slave or in domesti cated animals with man s relation to woman, and he quotes Hesiod : OLKOV jJ.lv TrpcuTio-ra ywaiKa re fiovv r aporrjpa (Politics, 1, 2, 5). The village, again, with him is a colony or offshoot of the household, and monarchical govern ment in states is derived from the monarchy of the eldest male member of the family. Now, though certain ancient terms, introduced by Aristotle in the chapters to which we refer, might have led him to imagine, as we shall see, a very different origin of society, his theory is, on the face of it, natural and plausible, and it has been almost universally accepted. The beginning of society, it has been said a thou sand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother, and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children, and the goods of the little community ; at his death, his eldest son succeeds him ; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or yeVos. As generations multiply, the more distant relations split off into other clans, and these clans, which have not lost the sense of primitive kinship, unite once more into tribes. The tribes again, as civilization advances, acknowledge them selves to be subjects of a king, in whose veins the blood of the original family runs purest. This, or something like this, is the common theory of the growth of society. On the other side, the following facts are to be noticed : (1) In many barbarous communities the family, in our sense of the word, does not exist. (2) The traditions of civilized races report a similar state of things in their early experience. (3) The domestic institutions of savages, and traces of the same manners among cultivated races, point to an age when the family was not constituted in the modern way. (4) The larger tribal associations of savages were clearly not developed out of the monogamous or patriarchal family. (5) The larger tribal associations of Greece, Rome, and India bear marks of having been evolved out of the tribal associations of savages. If these points can be proved, the family is not the earliest, but one of the latest conquests of civilization. We shall consider these points in order. 1. At whatever epoch civilized travellers have visited peoples of less cultivation, they have noted, with uncon cealed surprise, not the family, but promiscuity and poly andry. They have found men and women living together in what seemed unregulated community, or they have found that the woman had several husbands, and often that these husbands were brothers. They have alleged that the woman, not the man, was really head of the household, that kinship was traced through the female line, on account of the certainty of that sort of genealogy, and consequently that a man s children belonged, not to his own family, but to that of the wife, in whose affections he had only a limited or transitory share. It may be presumed, with some con fidence, that these customs, observed in lands and ages widely apart, cannot have grown out of the monogamous or patriarchal family as we know it. The limitless area in which such practices have been usual may be gathered from a few examples. Thus Herodotus says of the Agathyrsi, a Scythian people (iv. 104) : &quot;They have their women in common, that they may all be brothers of each other.&quot; The Nasamones (iv. 172) have similar customs; of the Massiigetre (i. 216) it is said that each marries a wife, Tairn/cri Se ITTLKOLVO. xpeWrcu. Aristotle alludes to similar promiscuity among the Libyans (Pol., ii. 3, 9) ; they have their women in common, and distribute the children by their likeness to the men. Diodorus Siculus reports the same manners among the Troglodytes and the Ichthyo- phagi on the coast of the Red Sea. The Auseis by the Libyan lake Tritonis, though they seem to have set store on the chastity of unmarried women, are said by Herodotus to have lived like cattle, with no permanent cohabita tion (iv. 180). These are examples of reported promis cuity in ancient times. Though the observers may have overlooked, and probably did overlook, some regulations, yet it is plain that in the societies spoken of the mono gamous or patriarchal family cannot have existed, and so cannot have been the germ of such wider tribal associations as were then established. Turning to modern savages, we find the custom of lending wives, as an act of friendliness and hospitality, very common. This may be no more than mere profligacy, in a society where male kin is recog nized ; but the marriage custom of Thibet, which assigns to a woman several brothers as joint husbands, cannot be thus explained. This amazing practice is the rule of life &quot; among thirty millions of respectable people&quot; (Wilson, Abode of Snow). As to the area over which some form of polyandry extends, the reader may consult Mr M Lennan s Primitive Marriage (Edinburgh, 18G5, p. 178, 183), where it is traced &quot;to points half round the globe.&quot; Ceesar describes something like it among the inhabitants of Britain (De Bella Gallico, lib. v. c. 14) : &quot; Ten or twelve men have wives in common, and chiefly brothers share with brothers, and father with children.&quot; According to a fragment of Polybius, the same fraternal arrangement was not unknown among the Spartans. Among the Nairs of Malabar, a woman Las several husbands, but these are not brothers (Asiatic Researches, vol. v. p. 13; Hamilton s Account of East Indies, vol. i. p. 308; Buchanan s Journey, vol. ii. p. 411). Among the Nairs the woman lives with her mother or brothers, or in other cases has a house of her own, where she receives her husbands. &quot; No Nair knows his father, and every man looks upon his sister s children as his heirs&quot; (Buchanan, ii. 412). Some other examples of very loose relations between the sexes will be found in Mr Herbert Spencer s Principles of Sociology, vol. i. chap. 5, 6. But, to be brief, we strike on instances as soon as we look below the sur face of civilization. Thus, in the Marquesas Islands, Mr Melville (Narrative of a Four Months Residence, 1846, p. 212) describes polyandry, and asks, with some naivete, &quot; Where else could such a practice exist even for a single day 1 ?&quot; He would have found the practice among the Tsonnotouan Iroquois. &quot; La polygamie qui n est pas permise aux homines, 1 est pourtant aux femmes&quot; (Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages Americains, vol. i. p. 555, 1726). If we are to maintain, as it was usual to declare, that &quot;it is difficult to say of what races of men it is not allowable to lay down that the society in which they are united was originally organized on the patriarchal model,&quot; we must believe that some strange necessity, or some monstrous pro fligacy destroyed the patriarchal model among the people whose manners we have been studying. 2. If we can trust the traditions of Indo-European and other polite peoples, they too once lived in a stage which can hardly be discerned from promiscuity, and they too allotted many husbands to one wife. Beginning with Greece, we find the legend in Suidas (p. 3102), that the women of Attica abandoned themselves to unchecked vice, and that the male parentage of children could not be ascertained. According to the story of Varro (Augustine, De Civ. Dei, 1. xviii. c. 9), it was Cecrops, the serpent-king, who first in stituted marriage, just as the Australian natives credit the lizard with the discovery. The Hindoos give it to Svetaketu, before whose date &quot;women were unconfined, and roamed at their pleasure This ancient custom is even now the rule for creatures born as brutes and it is still practised among the northern Kurus&quot; (Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part ii. p. 336). The Egyptians attri buted the origin of marriage to the rule of Menes; the