134 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



the marriage-bond was loose and chastity was not 

 very seriously regarded. But we have no actual 

 record of legal polyandry. The case of Greece is 

 different. According to Polybius polyandry was 

 customary at Sparta, where three or four men, or 

 even more if they were brothers, were the husbands 

 of the same woman. Unlike the British custom, the 

 children we learn were reckoned to the brothers in 

 common. The custom by which old men having 

 young wives lent them to sturdy young men whom 

 they picked out for the purpose of begetting beautiful 

 children long continued to be observed. It shows 

 the Spartans as more anxious to secure for their 

 children handsome and healthy parents than them- 

 selves to beget them. According to the current story 

 Lycurgus went further. He favoured the lending 

 of wives by others than old men and apparently even 

 overtures by women, though perhaps not without 

 marital consent. Thus their very tolerant sexual 

 code and the complaisance of Spartan husbands were 

 sheltered beneath the authority of the mythical legis- 

 lator. Nor, if we may judge by Aristotle's ani- 

 madversions, were the women at all inclined to allow 

 his statutes to remain a dead letter. 1 



1 Polybius, xii. 6; Plut, Lycurgus Xenophon, Rep. Laced, i. ; 

 Aristotle, Pol. ii. 9. Aristotle relates that according to tradition 

 the licence of the women was due to their having successfully 

 resisted Lycurgus' efforts to control them by law. 



In classical times the legend ran that Cecrops first instituted 

 monogamy at Athens ; before his time connections had taken place 

 at random, men had had wives in common, and people did not 

 know who their fathers were because of the number of possible 

 parents (Athenaeus, xiii. 2, quoting Ciearchus of Soli). This is 

 obviously, as Miss Harrison (Prolegomena, 262) says, a confused 

 tradition of rnotherright (which we ha.ve already found reason to 



