Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/184

 especially if they have been sterile; in this commerce they unite pleasure and profit.

The concubinate is not more rare among the Aryans than the Semites. The monarchs of ancient Persia had, we know, a troop of concubines; and in all the great barbarian societies, the princely concubinate is only the survival of old customs.

In India the Brahmins of the middle class often have one chief wife, and at the same time several domestic concubines.

We have seen that in Homeric Greece the concubinate was a general practice, and in no way censured. In later times, when Greece was more civilised, the primitive domestic concubinate disappeared, but there always remained to alleviate the ennui of monogamic marriage what we call concubinage, or hetaïrism, which was openly practised by Socrates and Pericles. "If," says Lecky on this subject, "we could imagine a Bossuet or a Fénélon figuring among the followers of Ninon de Lenclos, and publicly giving her counsel on the subject of her professional duties and the means of securing adorers, this would be hardly less strange than the relation which really existed between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota."

All societies which have had any legal form of marriage have adopted the concubinate, either free or more or less regulated, but it has nowhere been so precisely legalised as in ancient Rome. I shall say a few words about it, not that I intend to walk in the steps of our legists, but in order to show what assistance ethnographical sociology could be to the science of written law. By its means alone can the legal texts, which have been a hundred times studied, commented on, and criticised in an isolated manner, as if they related to sociological facts without analogy in the world, be connected with the general evolution of customs and institutions.

At the bottom, the Roman concubinate is essentially similar to the others; it has merely been legalised with