Ancient Greek Marriage: Contracts, Cousins and Divorce

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ANCIENT GREEK MARRIAGE


Wedding Procession

Greek marriages were usually arranged by parents and families. Men tended to marry relatively late, around 30, and women married when they were relatively young, around 14. It was common for well-traveled, high-status middle aged man to marry a virgin of 16. The main duty of the new bride was to produce children. Menader wrote: "I give you this woman (my daughter) for the ploughing of legitimate children."

Marriage was usually a matter of contract between the fathers or guardians of the young pair, and not the consequence of affection between the youth and maiden; and this it is which we see in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, who copied Greek originals. Very often the fathers agreed to a marriage between their children; sometimes the arrangements were made by a woman acquainted with the circumstances of the citizens’ families, who made a kind of business of arranging marriages. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]

An important point was equality of fortune; of course, both parties had to be full citizens, but degrees of relationship do not seem to have been any hindrance. The girl’s consent was not asked at all; it was a matter of course that she should accept the husband chosen by her parents, and, as she had no other male acquaintances, objections can very seldom have been made. Generally she was only acquainted with the husband destined for her by seeing him hastily on her walks or at festivals. The destined bridegroom is more likely to have made objections if the appointed bride did not please him; yet here, too, as a rule, the father could have his way, since his son was entirely in his power, unless it so happened that he earned his own living by any profession, which was seldom the case among the better classes.

Marriage Contract and Engagement in Ancient Greece

The fathers or guardians then concluded the contract of engagement, in which the bride’s dowry was fixed and special arrangements made for community of goods, return of the dowry in case of a divorce, etc. The Homeric custom, by which it was the bridegroom who brought gifts in order to win a bride, while the father gave his daughter to the one who promised the richest bridal presents, had early fallen into disuse, and probably even in the heroic period it was only customary among noble families. In the historic period a dowry was regarded as an indispensable basis for marriage: so much so that daughters or sisters of poor citizens were often endowed at the expense of generous friends, or poor orphan girls by their guardians; sometimes the State even gave a dowry to the daughters of citizens who had deserved well of their country. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]

The engagement itself was, as a rule, a legal act, which followed the private agreement between the fathers, and was considered an essential preliminary to a legal marriage; it was not, however, a general custom to celebrate this act in a social manner by a banquet. As is usual in southern countries, the girls married very young, sometimes even at the age of fifteen, or earlier; but the period between their sixteenth and twentieth years was probably the usual one for marriage.

There seems to have been no distinct limit of age for men, but probably the years between twenty and thirty were those in which most of them entered the married state. We do not know how long a period usually elapsed between the engagement and the marriage; probably there was no definite custom, but we know that very often the wedding immediately followed the engagement. We are likewise unable to say whether, in the case of a long engagement, the bride and bridegroom had any opportunities for meeting each other.

Cousin Marriages Surprisingly Common in Ancient Greece


Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: An international team, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, produced a scientific study of the genetics of people from a number of Greek islands. The team analyzed more than a hundred samples of genomes from inhabitants from the Neolithic and Middle Bronze age Aegean (17-12th centuries B.C.) and noticed an interesting result: more than half the people who lived on these islands married their cousins. The results were published open access in January 2023 in the prestigious journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, January 22, 2023]

Professor Philipp Stockhammer, a lead author on the study and archeologist at the Max Planck Institute, told CNN that the study was significant for what it revealed about social structures of the communities who lived on the Island. “We managed to construct the first family pedigree for the Mediterranean. We can see who lived together in this house from looking at who was buried outside in the courtyard. We could see, for example, that the three sons lived as adults in this house. One of the marriage partners brought her sister and a child. It’s a very complex group of people living together.”

According to the article the high rates of “consanguineous endogamy” (cross-cousin unions) are “unprecedented in the global ancient DNA record.” Stockhammer explained, “People have studied thousands of ancestral genomes and there’s hardly any evidence for societies in the past of cousin-cousin marriage. From a historical perspective this really is outstanding.”

One of the things that is interesting about this study is how it disrupts conventional narratives about marital practices among the ancient Greeks. The one place Greeks (or at least Greek ex-pats) are known to have intermarried in antiquity is in Hellenistic Egypt. From 322-30 B.C., Egypt was ruled by the Greco-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty, the descendants of one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Early on in this period the Ptolemies established a practice of incestuous marriage, marrying siblings to siblings and cousins (or half-cousins) to cousins.

What’s strange about this is that Greek intellectuals are known to have abhorred incest and saw it a loss of self-control and debauchery. In luridly relaying the bloody transfer of power from Ptolemy VI to Ptolemy the VIII, one third century writer CE laid the sensationalism on thick. Apparently, after the death of Ptolemy VI, Ptolemy VIII, the king of Cyrene, was offered the throne and the hand of his sister, the widowed Queen Cleopatra II (not the famous Cleopatra, one of many others). There had been a Ptolemy VII (the progeny of Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II) who had planned to wed his own mother. But on the wedding day Ptolemy VIII burst into the party, slaughtered his nephew, “and entered his sister’s bed still dripping with the gore of her son.” And you thought your relatives behaved badly at your wedding.

Why Did the Ancient Greeks Practice Cousin Marriages

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: If you’re thinking to yourself “well they are on an island, who else are they are going to marry” then you’re not alone. But the scientists who conducted the study concluded that “small population size was probably not a major reason… cross-cousin unions were practiced in different geographic contexts — on islands of different sizes as well as the Greek mainland and are not evident at some places during the second millennium.” On Crete, one of the islands included in the study, people had more options but they still seem to have kept things in the family. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, January 22, 2023]

Given that Greek literature — and societies in general — see incest as one of the greatest taboos (things did not turn out well for Oedipus, after all) there has been a proacted scholarly debate about why the Ptolemies engaged in it. One of the primary explanations is that they were influenced by the local culture. According to Diodorus, the Egyptians had made a law permitting brothers and sisters to marry, just as the Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis had done. This, allegedly, was why the Pharaohs married their sisters. Now, it’s worth pointing out two things: First, Egyptian Pharaohs did not marry their sisters as frequently as popular mythology maintains they did. Second, the Greeks had their own married sibling deities (hello, Zeus and Hera). Despite this and even though other Greek families who had moved to Egypt were also marrying their cousins, there is a tendency to blame the Egyptians for Ptolemaic incest.

Though the “Greeks” (if we can really use the term this early) of the Aegean islands lived hundreds of years beforehand and were socioeconomically removed from the Ptolemies, this new study show us that Greeks were marrying their cousins long before the Ptolemies settled in Egypt. While anthropological study of elite Egyptian cemeteries (3600-3000 B.C.) reveals that ancient Egyptians also practiced endogamy, they clearly weren’t alone. The Ptolemies may have thought of their behavior as influenced by preexisting traditions or they may have been colonial xenophobes, the point is, Egyptians shouldn’t take all the blame.

Anthropologists debate why it is that people marry close relatives. In the case of the new study of Bronze age occupants of the Aegean islands, scientists think that marital practices were affected by the food supply. Local agriculture centered on the production of grapes and olives, and these were crops that required sustained cultivation over a period of decades. This would have forced people to stay in the same place over a longer period. Genetics are local so the less movement, the less genetic variation. Or, put differently, the smaller your dating pool, the more likely you are to marry someone with whom you share a grandma.

Ancient Greek Divorce


courtship scene

Divorces were fairly common and easy to get in ancient Greece and Rome. Providing legal grounds for divorce was not necessary. A man could divorce his wife simply if he didn't like her anymore. All he had to was get a document from a magistrate. There is no record of one ever being denied.

Generally speaking, the law afforded a woman but little protection from her husband; infidelity on his part did not entitle her to a divorce. On the other hand, the strictest fidelity was required from the wife; but, in spite of the seclusion in which she lived, infidelity was by no means uncommon, since there were always plenty of obliging slaves ready to help their mistress in these matters. In most Greek states the offenders were punished by the loss of certain rights, and the husband was not only justified in demanding a divorce, but even morally bound to do so if his wife’s wrong-doing had been noised abroad. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]

The law took no steps to punish the lover; but the husband had the right to inflict corporal punishment on him, or even, if he caught him in the act, to kill him, unless, indeed, he preferred to seek compensation for his shame in a money fine. In case of divorce, too, the woman was worse off than the man. In consequence of the loose relation of the marriage-tie, it was very easy to break it.

Reasons for Divorce in Ancient Greece

The first divorce, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes, was performed on the grounds of infertility. If a couple could not get pregnant it was assumed to be the woman’s fault.

According to the Law Code of Gortyn (450 B.C.), the most complete surviving Greek Law code: “IV. If a husband and wife be divorced, she shall have her own property that she came with to her husband, and the half of the income if it be from her own property, and whatever she has woven, the half, whatever it may be, and five staters, if her husband be the cause of her dismissal; but if the husband deny that he was the cause, the judge shall decide...“VI. If a woman bear a child while living apart from her husband after divorce, she shall have it conveyed to the husband at his house, in the presence of three witnesses; if he do not receive the child, it shall be in the power of the mother to bring up or expose.

A husband could dismiss his wife or send her back to her parents, or the woman could simply leave her husband’s house, and this was usually enough to annul the marriage. In the latter case the wife was obliged to lodge a complaint against her husband in person with the archon, as there were certain legal matters connected with the divorce, chiefly concerning the dowry; as a rule, if the husband sent away his wife without sufficient reason, he had to give back the dowry to her or her legal representative (father, brother, or guardian), unless the cause of the divorce was infidelity which had been clearly proved against the wife. But though there is an appearance of justice here, in reality the man had the advantage; for it was only the most cogent reasons that would induce a woman voluntarily to leave her husband, while the man often arbitrarily put away his wife for the most trivial reasons; moreover, as a woman was always politically a minor, and if she left her husband could not go on living by herself, she was obliged to return to a state of tutelage under her father, or, if he were no longer living, her brother or legal guardian. Many a woman would rather endure the most cruel treatment from her husband than return thus to her father’s house. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Canadian Museum of History, Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT Classics Online classics.mit.edu ; Gutenberg.org, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Live Science, Discover magazine, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2024


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