The backdrop was perfect: the Acropolis at sunset, bathed in golden light. The topic was equally worthy: Greece’s role in the extraordinary success of Western civilization. And the goal was ambitious: to rekindle confidence in Western traditions and institutions as we confront authoritarian regimes in China and Russia, Islamic theocracies in the Middle East, and Islamist movements increasingly challenging those traditions within Europe itself.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a great speech.
But one paragraph fell short, at least for me.
“Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West,” Rubio claimed.
“Fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk, and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown. These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people — expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.”
But are these traits really so unique to the West?
Consider the Buddha. After abandoning his wife and child to pursue spiritual enlightenment, he taught his later followers not to accept a belief simply because it came from tradition, scripture, or a respected teacher. Instead, they were to examine ethical questions using their own independent judgment. Fierce individuality was hardly confined to the West.
As for relentless ambition, does anyone think Genghis Khan lacked it? After uniting the Mongol tribes, he launched conquests across northern China and Central Asia. His successors extended those conquests still further. Alexander the Great may have conquered the Persian Empire, but he hardly had a monopoly on ambition.
Then there is Ibn al Haytham, the 11th-century Muslim scholar whose investigations transformed the understanding of light and vision. His work embodied precisely the curiosity about “the world and the principles by which it operates” that Rubio celebrates. The desire to uncover nature’s secrets is a human impulse, evident wherever people tinker with their surroundings and ask how things work.
But Rubio is right. The West is unique. And the uniqueness did start in Greece. But Rubio never identifies it.
In 595 B.C., a statesman named Solon was put in charge of the Athenian army during a war with the rival city-state of Megara. After defeating the Megarians, Solon was named archon of Athens, and he swiftly enacted wide-ranging reforms that changed the course of history.
On the political front, Solon expanded membership in the citizen assembly, known as the Ekklesia, to all but the poorest citizens. The Ekklesia had the power to declare war, select military leaders, pass general legislation, and hold public officials accountable at public trials.
Under Solon’s new rules, the small farmers who equipped themselves as hoplites for war could now be part of this ruling body regardless of family ancestry. Solon further weakened the aristocracy by ending the practice of debt slavery and canceling all mortgages. This allowed many small farmers to avoid losing their land to wealthy families.
But the most important of Solon’s reforms had to do with marriage.
Previously, wealthy aristocrats could keep as many concubines as they wanted and adopt the offspring from those women as they pleased. Solon did not make sex outside of marriage illegal, but he did attach real penalties to fathering children with women other than a citizen’s wife. Under Solon’s law, only legitimate children produced within marriage could become citizens, thus preventing wealthy men from adopting their own illegitimate children from their concubines.
“By attaching legal disabilities to bastardy, Solon’s laws effectively discouraged aristocrats and the wealthy from producing excessively large families,” University of Southern California classics professor Susan Lape writes. “In so doing, the legislation foreclosed a source of elite power. It was no longer possible to convert material resources or economic power into reproductive power and hence into political power.”
More importantly, Solon’s reforms created a new spirit of equality among all citizens that paved the way for democracy.
“By attaching privileges to legitimacy and disabilities to bastards, Solon’s laws put every citizen on the same reproductive footing. Every man, no matter how wealthy or how poor, could only father legitimate children with one woman, his legitimate wife,” Lape writes. “For this reason, the norms of family membership can be correlated to an egalitarian ethos for citizen men.”
Before Solon’s laws, people in Athens didn’t think of themselves as belonging to a political entity; they thought of themselves as being part of a lineage or family dynasty. By strengthening the conjugal family and creating a clear line between citizens and noncitizens, Solon furthered the emergence of a new Athenian political identity that transcended family ties.
The Greeks, and the Romans after them, did not practice monogamy as we understand it today. Women were expected to be virgins before marriage and were forbidden from having sex with anyone who wasn’t their husband, but the story was very different for men.
Male citizens were allowed to and expected to have as much sex with as many women as they wanted, as long as they didn’t have sex with another man’s wife. Concubines, prostitutes, and slaves were all fair game. It wasn’t even considered a sin, let alone a crime, for men to satiate their sexual desires with all of the above.
Monogamy was more of a unilateral concept back then.
It was not until the Romans crucified a Jewish prophet for treason that monogamous marriage as we know it today fully came to be.
For the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, sex was not just a bodily act, but also a spiritual one. “Have you not read,” Jesus explains in the Gospel of Matthew, “that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh.”
Under Christian sexual ethics, husbands were no longer free to fornicate as they pleased. Paul explains in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”
A husband ruling over his wife’s body was common throughout the world, not just in Rome. But the idea that a wife should concurrently rule over her husband’s body was a truly radical one. It was unique to the West and became the foundation of our success.
The Church’s family policy — including a ban on polygamy, a ban on inheritance to illegitimate offspring, a ban on arranged marriages, and a ban on cousin marriages (which were often arranged as a means of keeping inherited property within the family) — weakened powerful kinship networks. As extended clans lost their grip, people increasingly formed smaller households and cooperated with unrelated strangers through guilds, monasteries, universities, and merchant associations.
A NATION IS MORE THAN A LABOR MARKET
This Christian sexual ethic of monogamous marriage encouraged impersonal trust and habits of cooperation that helped lay the foundations for Western prosperity and representative government.
Rubio is right to call for renewed confidence in the West. But defending our civilization requires understanding the institutions that sustained it. Monogamous marriage is foundational to that story. If we want Western freedom and prosperity to endure, rebuilding the family must be at the center of the task ahead.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
